Overview
For one of the five largest electronics distributors in the world, it’s a big challenge dealing with 750 suppliers and 8,250,000 items on the website, while maintaining outstanding customer service and reliable same-day shipping. It becomes even more difficult when the internet, the life-blood of the company, is a source of unpredictable demand that can affect processing resources and even the business.
Challenge
Consumers look for electronic components in many ways. Third-party aggregators are important in the industry; converting internet searches into queries that run simultaneously against the operational data of multiple distributors. The variety of queries is limitless and if they take too long, will result in low or no ranking in searches. This reflects poorly on an industry leader, lowers customer satisfaction, and takes away the potential sale of a component.
For the most part, there’s no way to isolate the query of a loyal customer from that of an aggregator searching for products and pricing across the web. It doesn’t matter; both demand a rapid response or it will affect sales.
Solution
Clearly we couldn’t control the complexity, the number, or the timing of the queries coming in. But we could minimize the size of the response, use less resources, speeding up response times and therefore improving the all-important position in the search response page.
Eliassen Group consultants were able to create a solution that illustrates one of the many benefits of using an API management product.
The mapping capability of IBM API Connect allowed us to strip out unnecessary data, links and images during conversion from XML to JSON, just by using built-in configuration and mapping tools.
Results
In a short time our customer’s results dramatically improved and their products are now consistently near the top of page 1.
