The Book Service (TBS) D2C Ecommerce Platform
Background
TBS Ltd (part of The Random House Group) is the UK’s leading trade book distributor with over 100 million books distributed annually. TBS offers distribution services, including fulfilment, warehousing and customer services to over 60 publishers. A strategic decision was made by TBS to adopt and deploy an e-commerce solution that would allow TBS clients to sell direct to consumers online.
Requirement
TBS needed an eCommerce system that could interact in realtime with its supply chain systems in an intelligent way to provide a first class end-to-end service to the customers of its clients’ websites. It was important that client publishers could adopt the solution yet continue to operate their existing websites with minimal impact.
Solution
Chameleon Net customised its modular, web-based eCommerce platform specifically for TBS’s needs and delivered a solution that provides:
- Hosted basket and checkout pages that can be branded for each client publisher, plus a simple webservice-based integration process
- Real time product availability, reservation, order payment/processing, order status updates and order history
- A central customer registration and authentication service
- Special pricing and promotion functionality
- Support for pre-orders, print-on-demand products, and subscriptions
- Customer services functionality, i.e. enquiries, refunds, etc.
We are working with TBS on an ongoing basis to enhance its eCommerce platform, currently including integrating the delivery of ebooks.
Results
The solution has proved very popular and has been adopted by publishers including Random House (www.rbooks.co.uk), Osprey Publishing, Faber and Faber, Templar Books, Constable & Robinson and Hay House Books, with many more planned to come on board during the course of 2009.