Description of the company’s operation

Describe about the Temple and Webster Application for The Artisans.

Temple and Website are named after the two artisans, William Temple and John Webster, who were commissioned by the Governor Lachlan Macquarie in 1820, to make furniture. The two are remembered for their teamwork, craftsmanship, and resourcefulness.

This report on the e-business website Temple & Webster discusses in detail the operation of the company describing its website, journals, blogs, the kind of product it houses and the ways it handles customer interaction. Ease of e-commerce website is detailed by mentioning its magazine-like interface, attractive contents, and extensive product range. The company handles its customer service via Desk.com and its various customer operations, and services are detailed. The company’s marketing strategy is detailed which mentions the use of social media and advertisements in digital and physical format. In the supply chain strategy, the company speaks about its balanced approach in the Australian market. In the security strategies, the company states the different ways it handles customer data and privacy in a transparent manner. The concluding part IT Section tells about the various components of the services framework. Recommendations are made accordingly.

Temple & Webster is Australia’s biggest online-only furniture retailer. The company houses furniture and homewares from boutique brands and upcoming designers to big brands. The site has a search function which lets visitors search for the product of their choice. Currently, the company operates and delivers orders within Australia only. Besides selling products, the company also hosts its own journal and blog, which provides tips, tricks, how-to’s, interviews and more on styling ideas and decoration. The company keeps in touch with their customers via social media such as Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest (Templeandwebster.com.au 2016).

For furniture customers usually prefer brick-and-mortar shops for their purchase. Temple and Webster however, went fully online and designed their website in a magazine-like content and styling, with a wide product range while offering low prices compared to its other competitors. The new website has been substantially revamped, and the changes will be noticed for both existing and new users. Users can now browse through more than 130,000 products which include sporting equipment, tableware and kitchen, living room furniture, rugs to bed lines, children’s toys to furniture, cushions, and art (Templeandwebster.com.au 2016). Products can now be filtered by color, size, price and more. Their product shipping has got a lot faster with the product being supplied by the supplier within 48 hours and many items including rugs are shipped free within Australia. Limited offers and huge discounts are offered every day throughout the site, and will have red Sale tags in them. To make shopping easier, now the user can Shop according to their Style of preference like a luxe, industrial, classic and coastal, or Shop by Room. New additions also include favorites function to make personalized mood boards for sharing, or wishlist to share ideas about gifts with friends and family (Templeandwebster.com.au 2016).

Ease of use of the ecommerce site

To handle customer support and service, the company has managed to use Desk.com to manage the volume of customer inquiries via Facebook and email. It would not have been an easy task for the company as the support team receives around 5000 email each week. With the help of Desk.com, valuable reports and insights are produced, full customer preferences and histories are captured, and every inquiry is addressed (Temple & Webster 2016). Desk.com is structured in such a way that that the appropriate queries from email and Facebook are forwarded to respective team members by applying filters. Temple and Webster’s business also started to grow by utilizing the data captured by Desk.com to access valuable and detailed information on the performance of the suppliers, which are forwarded to the technology, merchandising and buying teams. Customer experience, therefore, is greatly enhanced by making use of the valuable insights. Temple and Webster making use of Desk.com can provide superior customer service of highest standards. The head of Customer Care, Cindy Dent makes sure that the team behind it responds to inquiries from clients in a reassuring, consistent and efficient way as possible (Salesforce.com 2016).

To accelerate sales growth in Temple & Webster, the company ramped up its cost-cutting efforts while accelerating sales growth by launching its own online store for limited offers. To meet its higher than expectation sales forecasts, the company spent much on marketing, including posts in social media, direct email, Google Ads, to TV and outdoor advertisements. More people visit the website of Temple and Webster than all five IKEA stores in Australia combined. The reason behind it is a mix of offline and online channels for their advertising marketing activities. The company believes that advertising offline helps to create a bond and creates a sense of tangible feeling in the mind of consumers (CommBank Blog 2016).  

Mitchell (2016) opined that, the company’s co-founder Coulter thinks that the firm has spent a lot of money and therefore, the company needs to follow a balanced approach by break even with existing cash and high revenue growth. Products are now shipped within 48 hours and there are many products like rugs, which are delivered without any additional shipping cost within Australia. Standard delivery costs vary from product to product and also depend on the shipping location. Flexibility of delivering products to workplace address is also available. Products can be tracked by a tracking number provided by them. Their products are shipped from multiple warehouses around Australia, which means products often are shipped individually if many items are ordered at once. In order to keep their product prices low, and selections large, they do not maintain a brick-and-mortar store (Mitchell 2016).

E-business applications currently used

Villa-Real (2014) explained that, Temple and Webster maintains the guidebook of security instructions when it comes to functioning of the site and maintaining privacy of customer data. The first step is implementing 128 Bit SSL encryption, as customers look for assurances that the payment merchant they are using is trustworthy. SSL or Secured Socket Layer provides an encrypted and secure connection between the site and the visitors. One of the easier ways to detect if the website uses SSL is to notice if the URL of the website starts with “https://”. The company also uses multifactor authentication, in case the customer account gets hacked or is not accessible. Multifactor Authentication also known as 2 Factor Authentication enables the customer to login to their account by multiple ways. For instance, if the customer forgets the account password, the person can request the password or to issue a new one, which when requested on the website will be sent to the customer’s registered email (Templeandwebster.com.au 2016). The company’s website clearly mentions the data it collects from its users and explicitly states that the client can request the data the company holds. The company also goes on to say that it is in compliance with National Privacy Principles and that it shares customer information with their suppliers, logistics partners, billing partners, Federal or State police authorities, and related corporate bodies (Digicert.com 2016).                

Jeston and Nelis (2014) stated that, the current revamped website of Temple and Webster is more responsive, fast and easier to navigate. The site has been designed to be used in desktop computer, tablets and smartphones with variable screen sizes. For smooth operation the IT architecture has been divided into different models. The logistics services model performs maintenance requirements and functions of the applications and the high-level application among them. The layered application model consists of seven components of the services framework. They are – Resource Manager, Translator, Transaction router, Application service provider, Formatter, Application service proxy, and Client (Palopoli, Rosaci and Sarne 2013).

Flash Sale

More and more e-commerce sites are opting for flash sales which are timed sales with massive discounts. They are usually limited in number, and this method has often proved to be the most useful in identifying the demand for a new product without wasting inventory, as they are limited in number.        

Focus on App and App-only exclusives

By developing an app for the website, the company will be able to reach out to even more customers who have a smartphone, and giving app-only exclusives like referrals for discounts, or sign-up bonus not only encourage the move towards app, but the promotion is often made by the customers themselves.

E-commerce marketing strategies

Regular Site Checkup

Site errors will happen over time as more and more content are added like new images, scripts, and videos, which results in missing links, redirects, and duplicate pages. Therefore, it is recommended the site does a check-up by using fee tools like Screaming Frog. With tools like Pingdom, the website’s speed can be measured.

Conclusion

The success behind Temple and Webster factors different reasons that include its operation, marketing techniques, applications used, and its ease of use. Temple and Webster is an online-only retailer, and its main website is the primary focus of the business operation. Besides selling products, it provides a premium level of customer service via Desk.com, which handles all customer related queries. The company’s marketing strategy includes airing advertisements on television and on outdoors, Google Ads and social marketing. The company is currently taking a balanced approach to reach a high revenue growth by breaking even with existing revenue. The company has employed 128-bit SSL encryption for securing transactions and customer data is collected and shared with various partners of the company, but the policy of company states the customer can request access to their shared personal data anytime. The current website is much more user-friendly with different filters, the wide range of available products, and faster shipping of goods. The IT architecture is composed of seven service frameworks for smooth operation in every aspect of the company’s operation. Recommendations are made on regular site check-up using free tools to maintain the website, flash sales to evaluate demand of a product and reduce inventory cost, and developing and app, and app-only exclusives to reach a wider mobile user base and encourage promotion.

References

CommBank Blog. (2016). Growing Your Business Online: Temple & Webster success story. [online] Available at: https://www.commbank.com.au/blog/growing-your-business-online-temple-webster-success-story.html [Accessed 27 Sep. 2016].

Digicert.com. (2016). All about SSL Cryptography | DigiCert.com. [online] Available at: https://www.digicert.com/ssl-cryptography.htm [Accessed 27 Sep. 2016].

Jeston, J. and Nelis, J., 2014. Business process management. Routledge.

Mitchell, S. (2016, Mar 16). Temple & webster rejigs board after shares dive. The Australian Financial Review Retrieved from https://search.proquest.com/docview/1773246545?accountid=30552

Mitchell, S. 2016, Temple & Webster loss balloons, Melbourne.

Palopoli, L., Rosaci, D. and Sarné, G.M., 2013. A multi-tiered recommender system architecture for supporting e-commerce. InIntelligent Distributed Computing VI (pp. 71-81). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

Salesforce.com. (2016). On-trend Temple & Webster delivers premium customer service with Salesforce – Salesforce Australia. [online] Available at: https://www.salesforce.com/au/customers/stories/templeandwebster.jsp [Accessed 27 Sep. 2016].

Temple & Webster. (2016). [online] Available at: https://templeandwebster.desk.com/customer/en/portal/articles/825933 [Accessed 27 Sep. 2016].

Templeandwebster.com.au. (2016). About | Temple & Webster. [online] Available at: https://www.templeandwebster.com.au/customerservice/about.php [Accessed 27 Sep. 2016].

Templeandwebster.com.au. (2016). Furniture & Home Decor Search: privacy-policy | Temple & Webster. [online] Available at: https://www.templeandwebster.com.au/privacy-policy [Accessed 27 Sep. 2016].

Templeandwebster.com.au. (2016). Furniture Online, Outdoor Furniture, Beds, Lighting, Bar stools, Rugs – Temple & Webster | Temple & Webster. [online] Available at: https://www.templeandwebster.com.au/v/cms/page/display?value=new_look [Accessed 27 Sep. 2016].

Villa-Real, A.E.C., 2014. Customer-controlled instant-response anti-fraud/anti-identity theft devices (with true-personal identity verification), method and systems for secured global applications in personal/business e-banking, e-commerce, e-medical/health insurance checker, e-education/research/invention, e-disaster advisor, e-immigration, e-airport/aircraft security, e-military/e-law enforcement, with or without NFC component and system, with cellular/satellite phone/internet/multi-media functions. U.S. Patent 8,831,677.