How Replacements.com built a better (and less expensive) mousetrap
Presenting 1.3 million SKUs online is difficult enough—but when 90% of it is long-tail inventory that might remain dormant for years until a customer request comes in, the economics of product display are even more challenging. Throw in a corporate mandate of frugal spending, and you have the situation Replacements Ltd. found itself in–and found a way out of.
The primary business of Replacements and its web site, Replacements.com, is replacing and filling in the missing pieces in consumers` china, silver flatware and crystal collections. The fragile inventory must be handled by hand rather than automated systems, which is why about half of the company’s 500-plus employees work in its warehouse. So about 50% of Replacements’ budget is devoted to its operations area where that manpower function resides; a given at annual budget time.
Given heavy demands on the budget by operations, Replacements has to be creative with what’s left in order to get everything done. And that’s sparked some original thinking that might not otherwise have surfaced, according to vice president of e-commerce Jack Whitley. For example, about 10% of the million-plus SKUs it offers is popular and sells regularly. Much of the other 90%, including a large number of discontinued patterns, is long-tail inventory that sells far less frequently.
That’s not to say shoppers don’t want to look at it online. Replacements now serves about 25 million pages and gets well over 2.5 million visitors per month. With a high look-to-book ratio on the larger part of its inventory, presenting photos of the entire catalog online was prohibitively expensive as traffic scaled up. “So we’ve always looked for the way to do that technically in the most cost-effective way. It has to support itself,” says Whitley.
To resolve that issue affordably, Replacements found a way to tap the same internal database its call center agents use to create product pages for the web site. Some 300,000 inventory pages are drawn out of the internal database in a batched process each night, providing a near real-time inventory display for the web site. “We didn’t have to invest millions in infrastructure to host the application servers needed for 2.5 million visitors a month,” Whitley says.
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