Chapter 28: Project Case Study - Creating the Sales Data Analyst Application

SellingOnTheWeb is a fictitious e-commerce company in Santa Clara, California. It also has an online store on its Web site, http://www.sellingontheweb.com. This online store sells garments, personal care products, CDs, books, and toys. It's a relatively new company that deals only with customers residing in the US and Canada. Over a period of time, the customer base has increased, and the Marketing department needs better tools for data analysis and managing targeted e-mail. ColdFusion MX provides enhanced charting and e-mail integration features that will enable SellingOnTheWeb to find a solution for these problems.

SellingOnTheWeb—Curre nt Issues and the Proposed Solution

E-commerce is a new concept in the marketplace, and SellingOnTheWeb is trying its best to get more and more customers through e-marketing. To capture the market, the company needs to have the latest information at hand in an easy-to-view format. The sales information on the Web site is available in a database, but it's not utilized properly. The comparative sales figures aren't easily available. Due to the absence of a proper data analysis tool, the SellingOnTheWeb Marketing department has difficulty cashing in on its opportunities. The department needs a bigger picture, with options to get the finer details. For example, the department needs to send e-mail to buyers of a specific item. Currently, it takes a lot of time to organize a list of customers and send e-mail.

Apart from this, the online store faces the following problems:

• The Customer Care and Marketing departments cannot analyze sales data properly.

• Summarized figures, such as total sales, aren't available in an easy-to-view format.

• Time and resources are wasted on finding information such as the total sales in a year, total sales in a month, most items sold, and regional sales.

• The company takes a long time to send e-mail to targeted customers. By the time the e-mail reaches the customers, the market situation has changed.

• The company needs a single application for sending and receiving e-mail.

After the SellingOnTheWeb management team analyzed these problems, it decided to find a solution quickly to gain an edge in the competitive market of e-commerce. Therefore, a management team was formed consisting of executives from the Customer Care and Marketing departments. The team discussed issues, such as extracting the right kind of information and managing e-mail campaigns. It decided to develop a Web-based Sales Data Analyst tool. Because the executives were from different cities in the United States, the team decided to use a Web-based interface. The sales data from the current Web site is stored in a SQL Server database called SalesData. The database administrator filters the appropriate data from SalesData and enters it into a separate SQL Server database named SalesAnalysis. The Sales Data Analyst tool uses this database to perform further analysis on the sales data.

The development team suggested using ColdFusion MX because it contains the tags to display data in easy-to-view chart formats. ColdFusion MX also has e-mail integration tags for sending and receiving e-mail.

Here are the advantages of the new application:

• It uses the existing sales data to show meaningful summarized information.

• It displays information in the form of charts, which are easy to understand. For example, sales figures for all the categories for the current year and the current month are displayed in one chart.

• Charts display the finer data.

• Users can view data such as the top 10 items sold in the current year and month.

• It allows the Marketing department to undertake e-campaigning in full swing. All the required customer lists for sending e-mail are shown to the Marketing personnel.

• It allows users to receive and view their e-mail.