One Kings Lane or “OKL” as we fondly referred to it, is an eCommerce website specializing in high end home decor at a discount. The company used a flash sale model banking on shoppers to open daily emails to shop for the latest high end deals. By the time I left, the company had been valued at $900M doing almost $1M in sales a day.

Vendor Portal

I was part of the early team that built out and optimized the Vendor Portal platform; an application for OKL business partners aka vendors to manage their account, fulfill customer orders, sign up for direct deposit, and be able to reach out directly to the internal team via a messaging platform. VP was built on top of Microsoft Dynamics AX, an Enterprise Resource Planning Platform that managed all the backend code and batch jobs around order processing, accounts payable/receivable for vendor payments.

Vendors would request orders directly from our Vendor Portal UI, which directly integrated with FedEx to create packing slips and shipping labels:

Vintage + Market Finds

One of the early learnings during the VP development were recurring pain points reported from our vendors that they were not in control of listing their product and providing details on the product itself. Product listings were originally managed by our internal merchandising team picking and choosing which products would go on the site. Our team built a new LOB called Vintage + Market Finds or VMF, which provided the ability for vendors to self-serve and list products themselves within Vendor Portal. We built a series of emails that would be triggered based on the activity of submitted products.

The product would then be successfully listed on the OKL website: