What is Reverse Engineering?
Reverse engineering is dismantling a product or a process to identify and understand its components that work parallelly towards a particular goal. In e-commerce, reverse engineering is used to identify successful product procurement and fulfillment processes, marketing efforts, or any other process that is termed successful. Reverse engineering allows brand owners to negate testing by enabling them to map and model successful processes.
Significance of Reverse Engineering in an E-commerce Shipping and Delivery
Well-mapped reverse engineering allows brands to ignore the mandatory learning and experimentation curve required to find a successful product or process. It further allows businesses to save and relocate finances.
- Mimicking success: Through reverse engineering, a seller can map out crucial business processes like marketing, inventory management, sales, and operations planning. It can be mapped out from another seller, who successfully gets orders and fulfills them accordingly, with minimal turnaround time.
- Saving finances: Identifying a successful process or a product is succeeded by days and months of testing. It requires effort, time, and finances. Once a successful strategy is deciphered and mimicked correctly, it saves time and effort, but most importantly, a considerable chunk of finance is saved in the process.
Prerequisites of Reverse Engineering and How It Works
Reverse engineering can be done on any existing process and can also be used to identify winning products in the market. Therefore, as a requirement, there should be a process that needs to be modeled and enough resources to apply it in one’s own business further.
- Process selection: The winning process is to be selected by the seller.
- Dismantling: After selection, the process is broken down to identify the sub-processes and the services that create the identified sub-processes.
- Execution: Once all the sub-processes and the necessary components have been identified, it is modeled and executed.
Use Case with Reverse Engineering
A startup clothing brand based in Thailand identified a successful marketing process run by a Filipino brand, catering to the same target audience. Through reverse engineering, the startup identified that a significant social media presence was the key to the Filipino brand’s success. Subsequently, the startup hired a social media marketing agency to create a strong presence, which allowed them to reach their sales targets in record time.
