Pricing Automation for E-commerce | Discount Strategy Automation

Discount Strategy and Upload Automation for an E-commerce Giant.

Pricing and Discount management on the e-commerce platform is a very crucial operation directly impacting the revenues of the company.

The company was achieving customer demand management and pricing on their e-commerce platform with a team of 8 people. The team was overworked to keep up with the dynamic requirements of the market and adjust the discounts accordingly to meet the margins for each Business Unit.

The processing time was very heavy and errors were affecting the revenue due to incorrect pricing/discounts on the platform. Tracing the data source in case of vendor disputes was also difficult.

Completely unattended automation with extended validations to accurately and dynamically manage the discount strategy was implemented using a  leading RPA platform.

RPA Objective

Benefits

The business objectives and benefits expected by the Business Process Owner after automation of the selected business process are:

Pre-automation Process

• The Pre-automation process involves a lot of manual checkpoints as listed below.

The vendors send discount information for their style-ids in an excel sheet via email to the category manager.

The category manager manually validates the data in the excel sheet to ensure the format of the upload file is accurate and that the discounts are appropriate.

This data is then uploaded to the discounting services engine / the Pricing Admin.

This is then approved by a member in CDM and then by sellers

• Additionally, the process is highly dependent on the availability of people in each of these checkpoints
• The process is bound to cause human errors and lacks a proper tracking mechanism

Post-automation Process

The Post-automation process will follow the below-mentioned steps:

• Category Manager/Vendor sends a mail to the Bot in the required format
• The bot runs a check on the following items before uploading to the pricing engine

If the vendor code mentioned maps to all styles present in the input file

Check if the vendor is also aware of this upload (Vendor name in CC)

Platform Level checks on Total Discount(TD) to be performed

• Bot uploads the pricing on discounting services engine/the pricing admin

This process avoids human errors while uploading

The BOT will be functional 24*7 removing the time lag caused by manual intervention.

Automation Impact