Literature available to everyone

Russia's largest publishing house of educational and methodical literature has launched an online store that offers buyers of books in both traditional paper and electronic formats. Odyssey Consulting Group was a partner in the project.

The world of education and science is becoming global through digitalization. This is facilitated by the development of online forms of education and electronic formats of literature. Thus, according to the Russian Book Union, in 2015 the digital book market amounted to 1.7 billion rubles, demonstrating a significant growth rate of about 75-80%. According to the Association of Internet Publishers, this trend will continue: the volume of the market by the end of 2017 will be 4.3 billion rubles, and in 2018 - 6.4 billion rubles. The Prosveshchenie Group is one of the leaders of the book market, the largest publisher of educational literature in Russia. The history of Prosveshchenie dates back to 1930. Over the years the publishing house has published more than 10 billion textbooks and teaching aids used by millions of schoolchildren. The publishing house works closely with state educational authorities, and one third of the literature in the Federal list of textbooks, approved by the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, are Prosveshchenie books. Today the publishing house is a multimedia company that offers a comprehensive educational product: not only textbooks and teaching aids, but also electronic literature, methodological support, equipment necessary for the educational process, advanced training programs, and other services. The Prosveshchenie Group is actively involved in a number of programs to develop digital forms of education and electronic content. Such initiatives are aimed at increasing the level of accessibility of educational literature and education. Modern IT solutions that automate key business processes of the organization help the publishing house maintain its status as a multimedia company. Along with the development of digital content, Prosveshchenie takes active steps to improve the accessibility of its printed products. To achieve these goals, it was decided to create its own online store, which will feature all the products it creates: both electronic and traditional printed books. The digital transformation of business, the creation of convenient channels of communication with customers, including through the development of online sales, makes us closer to our audience. The launch of the online store helped ensure that the publisher's customers have access to educational literature, regardless of where they live.

Odyssey Consulting Group has offered to realize an e-commerce project on the basis of a multifunctional platform for Internet sales management. Odyssey Webstore platform was found to be optimal for automating all key areas of the future online store. The solution is based on the Microsoft-approved platform and is available for installation via WPI. The project included numerous integrations of Odyssey Webstore with the systems of the customer's partners: Russian Post, bank and express delivery service, customer address normalization service, CRM and back systems, online analytics services (Google Analytics, Google Merchant Center, Yandex. Metrika), solution for generating and transmitting data of fiscal checks for online store orders and cash refunds to customers in accordance with Federal Law 54. Creating a single space for the provision of services ensured seamless work with all resources of the company under one user account. The main goal of the project was to launch and qualitatively organize a lot of business processes, which had not been previously used in the publishing house. To prepare employees to perform new, unusual tasks - to work not only with the B2B market, but also with the main audience of the publishing house - students, parents and employees of educational institutions.

The launch of the online store was organized in the required time, strictly by the sales season - a month and a half before the start of the school year. The launch was carried out in July 2017. Thought-out strategy of commercial development and competently conducted IT works led to the fact that the declared sales plan for the period from August to December 2017 was fulfilled in the first 2 months. Sales of electronic and printed educational literature were realized. The first customer of the online store did not take long - the order came in less than half an hour after the launch of our online channel. This is very significant!