Hsin Hsin Galaxy: Offering stable, data-driven e-commerce operations solutions on Google Cloud
About Hsin Hsin Galaxy
Founded in 2013, Hsin Hsin Galaxy is a leading e-commerce operations solution provider in Taiwan. Providing a wide range of services covering logistics, transactions, business strategy, digital marketing, and customer support, Hsin Hsin Galaxy aims at helping its e-commerce customers increase sales effectively with its marketing experiences and technical advantages. It currently offers services to 150+ brands on more than 25 e-commerce platforms.
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About Master Concept
Master Concept is a cloud technology advisor founded in 2003 providing cloud strategy, implementation, and integration support to enterprises across all industries. With its offices in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, and China, Master Concept has helped thousands of businesses in Asia Pacific embark on their cloud transformation journey.
By leveraging the cloud infrastructure and data analytics tools of Google Cloud, Hsin Hsin Galaxy is able to offer highly stable and secure e-commerce operations services that enable its customers to track their marketing performance in real time and boost their e-commerce sales.
Google Cloud results
- Helps manage multiple software development partners securely and efficiently by applying firewall rules to VMs on Compute Engine
- Swiftly manages and analyzes data for real-time marketing performance tracking with BigQuery and Looker Studio
- Enhances productivity by using Google Workspace for internal and external collaborations
Eliminates at least 100 hours of data analytics workload per month
Established in 2013, Hsin Hsin Galaxy is a leading e-commerce operations solution provider in Taiwan. The company was jointly founded by Taiwan Hsin Lin, one of Taiwan's largest consumer packaged goods agents distributing products of 60+ brands from more than 20 countries through multiple channels, and HCT Logistics, which is a leading logistics company in Taiwan. Combining the resources and expertise of the two enterprises in the retail industry, Hsin Hsin Galaxy is committed to creating higher business value for e-commerce sellers.
"Our greatest advantage is that we provide a one-stop e-commerce operations service platform covering marketing, business strategy, customer service and logistics," says Chia-Ken Cheng, IT director at Hsin Hsin Galaxy. He further explains that brands who want to start selling products on e-commerce platforms often encounter difficulties in product distribution and marketing coordination. With the integrated services of Hsin Hsin Galaxy, e-commerce sellers can easily launch their businesses and adjust their marketing strategies based on user behavior data to increase sales.
Hsin Hsin Galaxy's business has been growing steadily since its foundation. At the beginning, its customers were all retailers of Taiwan Hsin Lin. Now, Hsin Hsin Galaxy has 95% of its customers acquired by itself, which proves that its services are well received by the market. When the e-commerce market in Taiwan boomed in 2022 because of COVID-19, Hsin Hsin Galaxy reached an annual growth of 57% in revenues. Currently, Hsin Hsin Galaxy provides services to 150+ brands on more than 25 e-commerce platforms and expects to have its stocks traded in Taiwan's over-the-counter market in 2023.
"As the number of our customers and their e-commerce businesses grew, we needed a more stable and scalable infrastructure to ensure the service quality. Compared to on-premise servers, using a cloud platform like Google Cloud can help us reach this goal at lower operational costs."
—Chia-Ken Cheng, IT Director, Hsin Hsin GalaxyInitially, Hsin Hsin Galaxy used on-premise servers to deploy its one-stop e-commerce operations service platform. At that time, the network connection of the servers was disrupted several times a week due to the metro construction work nearby, which led to frequent service downtime. Besides, the amount of Hsin Hsin Galaxy's hardware resources often fell short when the traffic of the e-commerce websites that it ran for its customers was high, resulting in system crashes.
To enhance the stability of its services, Hsin Hsin Galaxy decided to move its service platform to a public cloud environment that can provide higher scalability at a lower cost compared to on-premise servers. Considering that the software development contractors of Hsin Hsin Galaxy had already been using Google Cloud for their development work, and Hsin Hsin Galaxy's team had been relying on Google Workspace for internal collaborations since 2017, the company chose to migrate its platform to Google Cloud for greater system compatibility.
"As the number of our customers and their e-commerce businesses grew, we needed a more stable and scalable infrastructure to ensure the service quality," explains Cheng. "Compared to on-premise servers, using a cloud platform like Google Cloud can help us reach this goal at lower operational costs."
Managing multiple software developers with Compute Engine to ensure information security
With the technical support of the Google Cloud partner Master Concept, the Hsin Hsin Galaxy team quickly got the hang of the Google Cloud products and swiftly completed the migration. Now, Hsin Hsin Galaxy uses the virtual machines (VMs) on Compute Engine as the servers of its e-commerce operations service platform. As the VMs on Compute Engine can scale up in time when there is high traffic, Hsin Hsin Galaxy is able to significantly reduce the downtime frequency of its platform and offer greater service stability.
As an agent that helps manage e-commerce sellers' operations, Hsin Hsin Galaxy needs to process a large amount of user data and therefore sees information security as a top priority. To quickly develop solutions meeting the markets' current needs, Hsin Hsin Galaxy outsources its software development work to external providers. However, it was challenging to safeguard information security across multiple developers when Hsin Hsin Galaxy deployed its platform in an on-premise environment, because it was complicated to implement strict data access.
After the migration to Google Cloud, Hsin Hsin Galaxy is able to create firewall rules for VMs on Compute Engine to better manage access authorization given to its partners. On top of that, for different software providers, Hsin Hsin Galaxy's IT department can set up isolated environments on Compute Engine that run the same operating system as the software they develop, which enables Hsin Hsin Galaxy's partners to easily move their software to the VMs on Compute Engine and update the software by themselves. This way, the risk of data leaks is greatly reduced, and Hsin Hsin Galaxy can manage software developed by multiple partners at ease.
Enabling real-time e-commerce marketing performance tracking with BigQuery
To provide data-driven e-commerce marketing services, Hsin Hsin Galaxy created a data analytics department to help its customers gain business insights from their sales data. Before migrating its platform to Google Cloud, Hsin Hsin Galaxy stored its customers' sales records in Excel spreadsheets. But when the data reached a certain amount, the built-in analytics features in Excel were not able to run properly. Now, Hsin Hsin Galaxy uses BigQuery as its data warehouse to store and analyze its customers' sales data, and exports data analytics results to Looker Studio for visualization. Cheng says that it only takes a few seconds to process 300,000 entries of data and visualize analytics reports on BigQuery and Looker Studio.
"In the past, our data analytics team of 20-something employees used to each spend at least four to six hours every month to manually generate sales reports. Using BigQuery and Looker Studio to process data automatically has enabled us to fully eliminate this workload," adds Cheng-Hao Shaw, Vice Operating President, Hsin Hsin Galaxy.
"In the past, our data analytics team of 20-something employees used to each spend at least four to six hours every month to manually generate sales reports. Using BigQuery and Looker Studio to process data automatically has enabled us to fully eliminate this workload."
—Cheng-Hao Shaw, Vice Operating President, Hsin Hsin GalaxyOn top of that, since Looker Studio can be seamlessly connected to multiple data sources, including Google Ads, Sheets, and Facebook Ads Connector, Hsin Hsin Galaxy's customers can now view all their business data, such as SEO advertising performance on Google Search and Facebook, product stockage and sales record, on the dashboard of Looker Studio. Shaw believes that the higher data visibility helps Hsin Hsin Galaxy's customers increase their revenues. Before using Looker Studio, Hsin Hsin Galaxy's employees could only evaluate the performance of a marketing event when it ended, because it took a long time to gather data from different marketing platforms. Now, the team can view the marketing performance in real time on Looker Studio several hours after the event was launched. As a result, it is able to advise its customers on how to improve their marketing strategies based on data.
At the same time, using the data analytics tools of Google Cloud has also helped Hsin Hsin Galaxy save a significant amount of operational costs. "To build the same hardware specifications and software capabilities as BigQuery and Looker Studio, it would have required at least millions of NTDs. And we would have had to maintain the system by ourselves, which is also very costly," notes Shaw.
Enhances productivity with Google Workspace
The first Google Workspace tool that Hsin Hsin Galaxy adopted was Gmail. Before, Hsin Hsin Galaxy used a self-built Outlook email system based on Linux, which required several security certifications to be accepted by other email systems as a trusted sender. This resulted in many issues, such as failed delivery, unfiltered junk mails, and low information security. Since Hsin Hsin Galaxy replaced the previous email system with Gmail in 2017, all the above-mentioned issues were solved thanks to the high-standard security mechanism of Gmail.
Now, Hsin Hsin Galaxy's employees use Calendar to manage work schedules, contact customers with Gmail, process internal data with Sheets, and store internal files in Drive. According to Shaw, the comprehensive collaboration tools of Google Workspace have helped boost the Hsin Hsin Galaxy team's productivity, because all the tools can be seamlessly integrated. For example, Hsin Hsin Galaxy's staff can directly retrieve data from Sheets in their presentations, which enhances work efficiency. By storing all the internal data in Drive, Hsin Hsin Galaxy can easily create backups and change the data access authorization settings when an employee leaves or joins a department.
Besides leveraging Google Workspace for internal collaboration, Hsin Hsin Galaxy also uses the applications to work with its customers. For example, it uses Sheets to register invoices sent to its customers. As the time when data are entered and the person who enters the data are all saved for each cell on Sheets, the Hsin Hsin Galaxy team and its customers can review and update the records respectively, which helps save a lot of communication time.
"The diverse collaboration tools of Google Workspace have not only changed the ways our team processes data and arrange work schedules, but also helped us communicate with our customers more efficiently," says Shaw. "With Google Workspace, we're able to focus more on promoting our business without worrying about technical details like file sharing and transferring."
Using cloud tools to expand services and enter foreign markets
Moving forward, Hsin Hsin Galaxy plans to enter foreign markets by replicating its successful business model in Taiwan. Cheng says that leveraging the global data center network of Google Cloud will help Hsin Hsin Galaxy deploy its services in a new market faster. Besides, Hsin Hsin Galaxy considers using AppSheet to simplify software development, enabling its non-IT employees to complete daily tasks more efficiently by creating simple applications. It will also employ the image generation and natural-language understanding features powered by the artificial intelligence technology of Google Cloud to develop more advanced customer service solutions.
"The e-commerce market is changing every day, and Google Cloud has effectively helped us build a resilient company that is always ready for new challenges by enhancing our service stability, data analytics efficiency and productivity."
—Cheng-Hao Shaw, Vice Operating President, Hsin Hsin Galaxy"The e-commerce market is changing every day, and Google Cloud has effectively helped us build a resilient company that is always ready for new challenges by enhancing our service stability, data analytics efficiency and productivity," says Shaw. "In the future, we want to grow together with Google Cloud, create more business opportunities for our existing partners and expand our overseas business."
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Hsin Hsin Galaxy
Founded in 2013, Hsin Hsin Galaxy is a leading e-commerce operations solution provider in Taiwan. Providing a wide range of services covering logistics, transactions, business strategy, digital marketing, and customer support, Hsin Hsin Galaxy aims at helping its e-commerce customers increase sales effectively with its marketing experiences and technical advantages. It currently offers services to 150+ brands on more than 25 e-commerce platforms.
About Master Concept
Master Concept is a cloud technology advisor founded in 2003 providing cloud strategy, implementation, and integration support to enterprises across all industries. With its offices in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, and China, Master Concept has helped thousands of businesses in Asia Pacific embark on their cloud transformation journey.