In order to underpin early success and future growth plans, AIM listed EBTM turned to Maginus for a new e-commerce website which has enabled the company to tailor the look, feel and content of its website, quickly and easily, to reflect the different cultures of its music-loving customers. EBTM.com sells officially-licensed music products, from T-shirts and jeans to jewellery, accessories and gifts. With different brands and bands appealing to completely different parts of its customer base, the company needed an e-commerce platform with maximum flexibility for all key elements of its website. The Maginus solution gives its marketing team full control of products, prices, promotions, cross-selling and up-selling, as well as powerful website skinning capabilities that enable EBTM.com to change the appearance and content of pages to personalise them to meet the preferences of each customer.

“The fashion business, like the music business, is about absolutely understanding the styles and aspirations of your customers,” says Richard Breeden, chief executive at EBTM.com. “Each customer has a very clear idea of what’s hot, and what’s not. Maginus e-commerce lets us create a cool, easy-to-use website that meets their needs as individuals, and offers an easy way to shop for the brands they most identify with. Behind the scenes, it gives us the tools and intelligence we need to optimise the site, manage promotions, affiliates, search engine strategies, and everything we need to run slick, successful online business.”

To avoid irritating customers from one genre with inappropriate promotions, the Maginus solution helps the company filter its content in multiple dimensions simultaneously. Customers can browse by genre, such as metal, indie, emo and rock; or by gender and type of product; or by band and brand. The range of products presented to users on the site is constantly refined based on each customer’s browsing and buying behaviour.

The extensive e-commerce implementation included a wide range of Maginus technologies, skills and services. Highlights of the project include ‘Super Skins’, where each affiliate relationship now has a custom website skin to greet its specific visitors. The skins allow merchandising and product filtering ensuring the appropriate promotions are presented to the targeted customer, and ‘Advanced Search’, which helps merchandise and present products using a guided navigation approach.

The web analytics solution in Maginus e-commerce helps EBTM.com monitor and optimise the performance of its website. It provides tools to track typical web metrics such as clicks and page impressions, but crucially it also relates those activities to campaign costs, revenues and margins. Now EBTM can evolve its site continuously in line with its changing marketplace, customer base and business goals, and the Maginus Hosting Solution flexes with EBTM’s requirements and catered without fault with 400 per cent increase in Christmas traffic.

The company has also taken the Maginus Business Intelligence Solution as part of the implementation. Raine Peake, EBTM trading manager says, “It is an indispensible tool for analysing and predicting our Sales Performance by any metric you can imagine...by analysing sales we can ensure we always have stock available for the hot products and discount those for which demand is fading.” The Business Intelligence Cube holds details of every sale the e-commerce solution has ever made. Peake adds: “We can slice and dice the data to create targeted mail shot lists to customer with specific buying patterns.”

The successful launch of the Maginus e-commerce website has been followed by the implementation of a full back office system, creating a comprehensive sales, service and supply chain management environment. This has led to increased stock visibility across its supply chain, promoted further improvements in customer service, and increased efficiency in its stock control and warehousing operation. The implementation of Maginus in the back office will also play a major role in the company’s international growth plans. The back office software will enable EBTM.com to handle international retail and wholesale business using one integrated system.

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