With brick-and-mortar stores present in over 350 cities across India, Blackberrys was keen to replicate its vast presence in the ecommerce landscape. The underlying vision was to extend its product reach to customers seeking the speed and convenience of ecommerce. Before partnering with Eshopbox, Blackberrys tried to work with a traditional 3PL — without an ecommerce focused approach.
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Most of Blackberrys market competitors were working with the marketplaces on the outright model, which meant sellers would sell their inventory to marketplaces in wholesale. This enabled marketplaces to control everything — from inventory hold to pricing and discounts. However, Blackberrys wanted to take complete control over their inventory and pricing — this involved selling on marketplaces as well as establishing a strong direct to consumer (D2C) presence through a brand website. Blackberrys wanted to make their online store the best place to shop. This required next-generation technology and ecommerce expertise, a centralised platform, infrastructure and full-service business operations.
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When evaluating ecommerce partners who could make Blackberrys realise their ecommerce goals, the team at Blackberrys were crystal clear about the capabilities they wanted their partner to have:

• Should be able to assist Blackberrys to establish and operate their brand website while providing an Amazon-like experience.
• Should be able to offer a centralised inventory for multiple channels, i.e the ability to sell on multiple channels without committing inventory to an individual channel exclusively.
• Should be a fulfilment partner rather than a service provider limited to just picking, packing and shipping orders.
• Should be capable of managing the entire ecommerce lifecycle - from selling on multiple channels to fulfiling orders to reconciling channel payments.

After a careful market survey based on their business needs, the team at Blackberrys found:

• One service provider to manage their order processing but could not guarantee meeting SLAs for every channel.
• Another service provider who could reconcile their payments limited to only Amazon and Flipkart.
• Yet another service provider to manage their customer deliveries — however, returns and refunds could not be organised.

Eshopbox guaranteed to deliver orders within the prescribed SLAs, offered to reconcile payments across marketplace, and were confident in providing a premium customer experience — which meant organising and automating their returns and refunds.

Eshopbox solution proposed the following features:

• Unified inventory across marketplaces, meant that Blackberrys could maximise their sell-through with optimum inventory hold.
• Blackberrys merchandise would have more visibility across the most competitive marketplaces with the badges that increase sales such as Amazon Prime, Flipkart Assured and Myntra Gold.
• Self-service customer portal for their website where customers can track their orders, initiate returns, and refunds.
• Digitise the channel agreements to record the remittance cycle and the fee structure of each channel
• Track payments in real-time to identify which are overdue, partially paid, or disputed. Additionally, identify incorrect or overcharged channel expenses.
• Eshopbox allowed Blackberrys to expand its customer base across more than 26,000 pin codes.