BrickByBrick Ltd.
BrickByBrick Ltd. (BBB) was an old school toy retailer. The majority of their revenue comes from high street shops and shops in major shopping malls. Covid-19 was bad news. Same as many high street retailers they were forced to shut down many shops. Shane Smith, the newly appointed CEO was given the task to lead BBB out of trouble. Before Shane joined BBB, he was the CTO of the online fashion retailer PingCo. PingCo is famous in aggressive digital marketing approach. Its famous (or some says infamous) dynamic pricing capability was made possible by Shane’s digital strategies. He determined to replicate his success in BBB.
PingCo
PingCo was a new comer quick fashion segment. In the past three years It quickly established itself as one of the major force by offering endless deals to its customers, e.g. vouchers, freebies, lightning sales, sweepstakes, Blitz Buy, VIP discount, new buyer discount. You name it they’ve got it. PingCo and BBB were not direct competitors but it’s fair to say they were not friends either. It’s not secret that many senior execs at BBB disliked PingCo’s ‘quick sales’ model although they didn’t quite understand how PingCo could adjust its marketing tactics so rapidly. It’s shocking to many that BBB’s chairman Liam Forster decided to appoint Shane as their new CEO. But Shane knew exactly what Liam want from him.
SuiteCRM
A few years ago, BBB started to use open source CRM system SuiteCRM manage their customer relationship. “Accidentally” someone spotted Products in SuiteCRM and decided its was also a master product repository. But they didn’t work out a solution to manage their products and especially the price of the products properly. It didn’t seem to be a problem at that time. BBB’s online shop was no more than just a replicate of one of their high street shops. The leadership team at BBB was enjoying their success partly because of the economic boom (although they hated to admit it). They invested quite heavily in new shops rather than in building up the digital infrastructure. Why should they? Over 85% of BBB’s revenues came from the physical sales channels. Online sales was picking up but still it only contributed to less than 15% of the revenue. Jeff Thomson, the CEO at that time didn’t feel the need to change it.
Fast forward to today, Shane desperately wanted to invest more in ecommerce and digital marketing. However the slump in Sales ate up Shane’s budget. He couldn’t afford big names like Digital River or Salesforce Marketing Cloud. He couldn’t afford to do nothing either. Shane’s chief architect Ken Wang suggested he might have an idea. The gap between CRM and eCommerce was actually smaller than many people would think and the baseline is SuiteCRM was not a bad platform at all. Ken proposed to build a dynamic pricing engine on top of their existing master product repository in SuiteCRM hoping it would allow them to mimic some of PingCo’s quick sale tactics.
He knew this was what Shane wanted to achieve. Reluctantly Shane agreed with Ken to kick off some discovery activities. “Let’s take a small step first”, Shane said, “Let’s build a online shop for our employees and see how it goes”. Ken’s exciting because his idea got the green light from the new CEO. But at the time the discovery project kicked started neither Ken nor Shane knew they had make the significant first step toward to great and affordable ecommerce solution.
| Chapter 1. Digitised pricing |
|---|
| A simple approach to manage discount |
| First step toward dynamic pricing |
| Special discounts for special products |
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