Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - SMILE (A smile in return)

Teaser

The European e-commerce market amounts to ~80 million purchases per day. About 15% of these purchased products do not live up to consumers’ expectations and are returned to the vendor. Whether in perfect condition or a little dented, their status as a returned product makes...

Summary

The European e-commerce market amounts to ~80 million purchases per day. About 15% of these purchased products do not live up to consumers’ expectations and are returned to the vendor. Whether in perfect condition or a little dented, their status as a returned product makes them ever so slightly second choice.
As a result, an immense amount of wonderful, desirable and valuable items are suddenly worth a lot less. What a waste! Not only for the retailer, but also for the environment - and therefore, for all of us. This is why we are dedicated to giving these products a new life and new value.
At BuyBay, each returned product receives a thorough inspection and if necessary, minimum to full refurbishment. With the product in optimal condition, we apply proprietary insights to match the product with a new owner and ensure streamlined distribution. This process generates maximum recovery for our partners, among which: brands, manufacturers and distributors. With each product sold, we make a consumer happy, reduce waste, create added value for our partners and leave our world a little more sustainable.

Work performed

Project SMILE started at June 1st 2018 with a total duration of 24 months. In total 24 deliverables were drawn up and after the first reporting period, 12 deliverables were successfully submitted.

The main achievements in the the first reporting period regarding the project are:
- We built a whole new IT infrastructure around the BuyBay value chain with many BuyBay specific features. Two leading IT systems were developed and are live at this moment. These new systems have already led to many process efficiencies.
- The new Business Intelligence (BI) team created a metric dashboard that visualises KPI\'s for all departments and enables partner SLA monitoring.
- We created AI smart pricing software that calculates the optimal price of a returned product.
- Facilities were successfully set up in Germany and France. As a result, we can now do business in these countries. German/French partners are sending us their products and we sell them on German/French sales channels to German/French customers. In the first reporting period, this has already resulted in a generated revenue of €2.1M in Germany and €0.29M in France.

Final results

Project SMILE started at June 1st 2018. Many ambitious goals were set and delivered for this project. The two most outstanding results for the sustainable BuyBay solution were the creation of a completely new IT infrastructure and achieving a high growth in recovery rates.
First, the development of the new IT infrastructure is discussed. The unique value chain of BuyBay asks for a robust IT infrastructure that is capable of processing the incoming stream of returned products in an efficient and scalable way. However, at the start of project SMILE, BuyBay’s IT infrastructure was outdated and lacked processing capacity. Moreover, systems were isolated and there was no collaboration between them. Due to the expected growth of the company, the old system had to be replaced. The new IT infrastructure, that exists of the two systems FLUX and VAULT, increases the role of IT in the organisation. With the new Infrastructure, new data driven opportunities arise that lead to elimination of earlier process inefficiencies and improvement of product throughput volumes. With the new IT infrastructure, BuyBay meets European scalability demands and is ready for the future. Second, the recovery rates are discussed. Due to the improvements of processes and operations, BuyBay experienced significant growth in the past reporting period regarding its recovery rates. Initially, in the first months of 2018, rates levelled at 56% and throughout the first year an increase of almost 6% -to an average recovery of 61.7%- was established. Considering this trend, BuyBay is well underway of reaching the initially set goal of 68.5% in 2020.
As a result of the increasing scalability and recovery rates, BuyBay becomes more and more attractive for partners, customers and its own employees and therefore increases its socio-economical impact throughout Europe.

Website & more info

More info: https://www.buybay.com/.