Client's case study: E-commerce - Mix.co.uk

Uncover the impact of DecisionRules in enhancing the operations of The Mix, a UK-based e-commerce enterprise specializing in Garden and Home Furniture. By overcoming challenges in customer prioritization, product information validation, and text precision, DecisionRules introduced scalability, flexibility, and functionality. Through automated repricing, text accuracy checks, client scoring, barcode validation, and product information verification.

About the Client

Meet Mix, an exciting e-commerce company based in the UK. The Mix specializes in Garden and Home Furniture, boasting an impressive product range of over 25,000 items that customers can purchase from anywhere in the world.

As an innovative fast growing company  The Mix decided to use the decision rule engine.  DecisionRules set from the day one in core e-shop functionality. This decision allowed The Mix to provide their customers with a personalized shopping experience. Decision rules make shopping tailored to client specific needs and preferences. Such an online shopping journey is fun and breeze.

The Mix found a strong benefit in DecisionRules and has scaled up usage of DecisionRules tremendously since they started. Within five months they increased from 300,000 API calls per month to a whopping 18 million API calls per month. Means 600,000 API calls per day, impressive isn't it?.

The Mix's story is a unique and inspiring example of how a company can think out of the box and leverage cutting-edge technology to provide a better customer experience to achieve rapid business growth.

The Challenge

The Mix faced a range of challenges across their e-commerce journey, requiring innovative solutions in three key areas:

  • Priority Management: As an online company, The Mix needed a way for support and client service teams to prioritize customer questions and requests more efficiently. They accumulate the knowledge into the automated scorecard to calculate the importance of questions and requests.
  • Product Information Validation: With a range of 25,000 plus products in stock, The Mix needed an automated system to validate product information and ensure that all required details were in place. Additionally, they needed to validate barcodes associated with each product. Such complexity required a senior system to succeed.
  • Text Precision: The Mix needed to ensure that product descriptions were free of mistakes, incorrect characters, codes, or text styles.

Why DecisionRules

Scalability Icon Image

Scalability

Flexibility Icon Image

Flexibility

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Functionality

At The Mix, we conducted extensive research into various rule engines before ultimately selecting DecisionRules. As an integral part of our e-shop from the very beginning, DecisionRules has been instrumental in helping us provide our customers with a personalized shopping experience and grow our business.

One of the key reasons we chose DecisionRules is its impressive scalability. As our API calls increased from 300,000 per month to 600,000 per day, DecisionRules continued to perform efficiently and effectively. We appreciate the flexibility it offers - allowing us to add additional servers or use more cores to meet our evolving needs.

DecisionRules also provided us with the flexibility to create the exact functionalities we need for our business. Unlike other tools that have limited capabilities, DecisionRules enabled us to develop and implement custom functionalities that are tailored to our specific requirements. 

Overall, DecisionRules has been an excellent choice for The Mix. It is scalable, flexible, and provides us with the functionality we need to run our business smoothly and efficiently.

Testimonial
Craig Newborn
Thomas Harvey
Managing Director, Mix.co.uk

"By using DecisionRules we've been able to ensure that pricing, product formatting and stock levels are considerably more accurate than when processed manually."

The Implementation: Intuitive and Efficient

At The Mix, we have implemented over 30 rules and 40 rule flows with DecisionRules. The process was intuitive and straightforward. We found the tool to be very user-friendly and easy to adopt. In fact, we did not even need documentation to get started.

Our entire team started to use DecisionRules, and we have found it to be very simple to incorporate into our existing workflows. One of our most common integration  involves request product information from our PIM (Product Information Management) system to DecisionRules. Decision rules validates, processes and responds with updated values to the PIM.

Overall, the implementation of DecisionRules has been simple, straight forward and hassle-free for us. The intuitive interface and ease of use allowed us to seamlessly incorporate it into our existing workflows and improve our business operations.

In what areas does DecisionRules help

Sample Layout
Illustration 1
Automated Repricing

DecisionRules regularly verifies the margin percentage of products and automatically reprices them if the margin falls below a certain level. This ensures that The Mix maintains the desired profit margin while remaining competitive in the market.

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Text precisioning and Validity Text Check

DecisionRules automatically review the validity of product descriptions and other related texts, removing common errors such as wrong styling, codes, and characters. This iterative process ensures that new recurring errors are quickly identified and corrected, saving time and resources needed for manual text checks.

Illustration 3
Client Scoring

With DecisionRules, clients are automatically scored based on their previous purchases, cart value, and the value of the product mentioned in the request or question to support team. r. Support teams can prioritize high-value clients and ensure faster response times or better service. This makes The Mix strongly client oriented and client pro active.

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Barcode Validation and Automated Reporting

DecisionRules controls the validity of product barcodes, flagging broken or invalid codes for correction. This saves mistakes, time and resources in manual checks. Calculation in DecisionRules enables to generate automated reports that help to control teams to keep track of issues with product barcodes.

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Product Information Check

DecisionRules checks if products are ready for publishing and assign tags based on their readiness. This includes checking for images, descriptions, prices, quantities, stock information, and more. This automated process saves a significant amount of time and resources in the manual checking of the stock products. Rules in DecisionRules supervise that marketed products have accurate and complete information.

The Result

We are extremely pleased with the DecisionRules tool. It has helped us to save a significant amount of time for our people. It has enabled us to achieve a higher level of automation we need, without hard coding.

The proof of the tool is also the fact of how quickly we scaled usage - in just five months, we went from 300,000 API Calls per month to 18 million API Calls per month.

DecisionRules has allowed us to be competitive in the market by reducing our expenses and making us more efficient.

Furthermore, we are planning to expand the usage of DecisionRules to other areas of our business. We would like to implement it for selecting the packaging for our products and to determine the optimal shipping provider. We will use DecisionRules to make more informed decisions about listing new products, based on their search records.

Overall, DecisionRules has positively impacted our business by increasing our efficiency, saving our resources, and enabling us to remain competitive in the market.

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