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DynamicAction benefits Calendars.com

By Retail Technology | Monday December 16 2013

Rapid deployment and turnkey implementation of hosted e-commerce analytics package drives profits for multichannel retailer during crucial Christmas season

With more than 80% of the world’s largest calendar retailer’s business occurring between November and January, Calendars.com could not be blamed if they followed most other retailers in issuing a moratorium on new IT projects or implementations.

But, driven by a search for innovation and a goal of increasing profits during the key Christmas holiday season, Calendars.com recently entered into an agreement with e-commerce technology provider eCommera to use DynamicAction, its software-as-a-service (SaaS) based application that collects, integrates and analyses thousands of data sources to provide daily actionable insights and recommended business changes. 

The software, which does not touch the Calendars.com site code or strain IT resources, was implemented for a mid-November launch to help Calendars.com understand and take action on vital profit drivers across marketing, merchandising, operations and finance.

Seeking accurate, timely analysis
 
“Our business must operate at a rapid velocity and have laser-focus during the holidays. Our marketing efforts, inventory controls, sales trending and merchandising efforts are critical to our annual success,” explained Paul Hoffman, chief executive officer of Calendars.com. 

“When we realised that DynamicAction would allow us to not only see how each of these operational areas was performing and thus affecting one another, but would also detail the exact actions to take to make the business more profitable – we knew that DynamicAction is critical technology that can positively affect our holiday season.”
  
Integrating all of Calendars.com’s data points – ranging from third-party email and search data to its own sales and returns data – takes place through the SaaS application, which its provider said does not require pixels to be placed or site code to be affected. Furthermore, eCommera’s Decision Science Practice Manager ensures the Calendars.com team does not have to hire or allocate resources to run the DynamicAction software day-to-day, freeing up team members’ time to focus on making profit during the holiday season.

Recommended profit drivers
 
“Even before we implemented, the Practice Manager offered keen insights and data-driven advice regarding areas of potential improvement across our channels,” Hoffman added. “Rather than distract our team by learning a new software during this critical time, we essentially gained new Calendars.com team members. The Practice Manager has years of retail-side and technology experience and can help guide our team in enacting the improvements that DynamicAction recommends to drive profit.”
 
Calendars.com will use DynamicAction to analyse and cohesively make decisions on its multitude of data points, specifically looking to the software for recommendations on actions, such as inventory search or category sort decisions during the holiday season and effectively cross-merchandising more than 6,500 calendars with over 9,000 puzzles, games, gifts and books. It is also using the its new SaaS analytics to help promote and merchandise its growing personalisation business, as well as aligning email marketing data with patterns and trends in other marketing channels.

By gaining insight on specific product sales trends, the company will also be able to create a decision framework around customer data, including order frequency, return history and on-time delivery performance

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