CTG Transforms a Textbook Corporation’s Web Portal into Ecommerce Platform

Texas Book Company was started in 1975, and it is one of the leaders in the academic, retail businesses in the USA. It has various divisions, including Retail, Military, OnCourse, which provides customized books and course material management on-campus and online. Its OnCourse platform is an academic online marketplace that offers books in all categories. TBC ensures education for everyone with a proven track record and decades of experience in the educational arena.

The Challenge and Opportunity

Marketplace research conveys that after 2019, every student buys ten academic books per year, and books belong to the top four categories in the e-commerce marketplace. Textbooks being the major sellers for platforms like TBC, they were interested in stepping up their game in this field and catering to many students through their online platform, popularly known as OnCourse, a web-based platform facilitating students to buy textbooks. Apart from textbooks for various subjects, OnCourse’s virtual presence also encouraged people to purchase supplies and merchandise popular among college students.

Numerous universities engage with TBC on a daily basis for creating their online book store. These online stores, which catered to students, also helped the college management track students’ financial aid accounts, orders for books and viewed the sales report of their digital bookstore.

TBC wanted to scale up its business to reach out to many more colleges, make their work quicker and easier, and alleviate the cumbersome processes. They wanted to consolidate all the web-based platforms, eliminating the need to create and maintain a database for every college and reducing the operational costs that went into the process. They wanted to upgrade to a technology that enabled them easier development of websites for every college with efficient and powerful tech concepts & tools.

The Solution and Results

With an understanding that upgrading to the right technology will give them an edge in the marketplace, TBC chose CTG as its technology partner to make OnCourse a sophisticated e-commerce marketplace platform.

CTG, with its extensive experience in various technologies, migrated the e-commerce marketplace platform to AWS. CTG developed a technical application framework that allowed enhancements in the customer-facing web-based platform. They implemented a completely managed cloud-based SaaS solution for TBC. The multi-tenant solution was highly scalable and included an integrated inventory management system, content management system, e-commerce storefront, accounting, payment management, sales, and reporting modules.

The SaaS-based cloud platform helped TBC scale its business and efficiently manage the e-commerce marketplace platform. They were able to oversee and manage the websites more efficiently with the platform, instead of running the entire process manually, for every college. Students could now easily access this application through multiple devices like PCs, tablets, and mobile devices. Also, the model that was built by CTG replaced the multiple codebases with a single codebase and decreased maintenance costs. This eliminated the need to have separate content pages for every campus associated with TBC. Also, the time involved in building the marketplace for every university was greatly reduced. This, in turn, reflected directly in the time involved in creating content pages, operational costs, and manual effort, thereby improving the efficacy of TBC’s e-commerce marketplace platform.

By enhancing the e-commerce marketplace platform based on open-source ERP platform (Odoo), TBC’s application could now be easily integrated with multiple vendor applications making it an easy and fast process for students accessing the website. Multi-Site and Multi-Location with independent access permissions was now possible. Also, unique user roles were easily identified and grouped based on the permissions. In addition, the AWS-enabled platform could now handle large volumes of traffic and data.

This easy-to-manage platform saved a lot of money for TBC that was otherwise spent on maintenance, and allowed TBC admins to provision and manage all college websites from a single administration portal. Within a short period, TBC acquired numerous universities that wanted to sell books to their students, and the user registrations skyrocketed in no time.

With the successful outcome of the partnership with CTG, TBC is planning to integrate a site named Faculty Books, a sellbook site where users (students or faculty) can sell their used books back to OnCourse. After which, it is estimated Faculty Books will also be migrated to AWS for scaling the business. They are planning to move their site ‘TexasBookCompany’ to cloud and rebuild the site for a faster response and better look. They are also planning to build exciting additional features for OnCourse to further enhance the Order Management, Catalog Management, and Inventory Management subsystems.