Sellers
Leveraging data to discover insights into abebook's sellers and implementing new processes
SELLER ASSOCIATION PROJECT
HOW I AUTOMATED THE PROSPECTING PROCESS FOR THE SELLER ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT TEAM
TASK
I was tasked to mine bookseller data from the US, UK, Canada, New Zealand and Australian Bookseller Association websites to help our Seller Account Management team (SAM) with lead generation. I was instructed to use the website’s page source to retrieve the data. However, I realized that using the page source data to retrieve the data would only work for the US Association website due to the webpage’s structure. When I reached this roadblock, I conducted my own research and decided to use a web scrapper. Thereafter, I taught myself how to use a free web scrapping tool to automate the data mining process.
PRESENTATION
After mining the data, I presented my findings to the SAM leader head and proposed using the web scrapping tool for lead generation. He wanted to verify whether this process would yield valuable leads for SAM. Therefore, he asked me to cross-reference the percentage of US Association sellers that already sell or have sold with AbeBooks. After cross-referencing our database using Excel, I concluded that only 312/3078 or 10% of US Association booksellers have partnered with AbeBooks.
RESULTS
The SAM head also wanted to verify whether association websites have the type of booksellers AbeBook targets. Therefore, he asked me to verify whether association booksellers have a lot of independent or second-hand booksellers using the UK sample. I used the web scrapping tool and excel to mine this data. I discovered that 949/1298 or 73% of UK Association Booksellers were independent or secondhand booksellers. I also created and published an instruction sheet for SAM on how to use the data mining tool I used. It now lives on Abe’s Confluence page where the entire organization can access.
CONCLUSION
I generated new outbound leads for SAM with valuable meta data and satisfied the stakeholder requirement. I also proved my data mining process was useful to SAM by uncovering that only 10% of US association sellers are partnered with AbeBooks and 73% of UK association sellers were independent and secondhand booksellers. Thereby proving that association websites have fruitful leads for AbeBooks. I’ve also implemented a new process that optimizes the prospecting process.
SELLER ANALYSIS
TASK
I assisted my supervisor on a cross-team project that involves various tech and business teams to help understand the value of AbeBooks to Amazon. These teams wanted an analysis of our top 100 sellers consisting of 50 small used rare sellers and 50 small/medium used trade book sellers. Top sellers are determined by GMS.
I researched key seller attributes like physical store, website, ecommerce, national association membership, interesting features, and worthy of follow-up from sales/marketing team. They also wanted me to time myself while doing this task to determine the project’s scalability because executives wanted to collect this data for all 6000 of AbeBook’s sellers.
IMPACT
I pioneered this task and determined the project’s scalability. I did this task manually with a rate of 14 booksellers/hour and suggested they find a way to automate this process. I also helped cross-funcitonal teams at Abe understand the value of AbeBooks to Amazon and deepened our understanding about sellers.
For example, a majority of our top sellers consist of niche booksellers who operate out of their homes. For a long time, teams believed brick and mortar bookstores were our top sellers, but my data revealed we needed to re-evaluate Abe’s assumptions.
GERMAN VAT
SITUATION
AbeBooks is currently required to hold a valid tax certificate for German sellers, for tax purposes. The tax certificates are stored in Amazon’s TOM system. Effective July 1, 2021, the tax requirement is changing to replace paper tax certificate collection with an obligation on the marketplace to collect a German VAT registration number from German sellers. While most German sellers already have a German VAT Number in their AbeBooks account, 203 don’t. As the tax certificates in Amazon’s TOM system contain VAT numbers I was tasked to copy those numbers into AbeBooks, instead of asking the sellers to add numbers to their accounts which we have access to.
BEHAVIOUR
For this task, I learned new internal tools and databases to access seller information. I input seller VAT from the TOM system into our database and flagged sellers that didn’t have their VAT in our TOM system. By doing so, I saved the Seller Account Management (SAM) team a lot of time because they didn’t have to ask all of the German sellers for their VAT number. I also identified sellers that needed to be contacted for their VAT numbers. As a result, we were able to comply to German laws and prevent existing vendors with a valid status to be blocked from selling in Germany.
"She completed the task quicker than expected, and did a thorough job."
FEEDBACK
Feedback from Lee-Ann, ABeBooks SAM Program Manager who assigned me this task.
“She completed the task in a timely manner, and followed the SOP that was provided. She even provided additional information about what she encountered as she backfilled the VAT numbers which was helpful, and added a legend to the spreadsheet. She asked questions when they unexpected results arose, to verify her actions were correct. Please let me know if you need any more feedback. I don’t have anything constructive to add – she completed the task quicker than expected, and did a thorough job.”