No ‘By-the-Book’ Platform

If an online retailer gives its merchants — rather than its IT staff — a tool to manage merchandise and editorial content on its website, will the resulting ability to quickly deliver product content and traffic-building marketing messages boost sales significantly?

According to Lance Martel, vice president of customer solutions for Toronto-based Indigo Books & Music, the answer is a definite “yes” — especially when it comes to driving sales in new growth categories.

With nearly 250 stores under several banners including Indigo, Coles and Chapters, Indigo Books & Music is Canada’s largest book, gift and specialty toy retailer. In the fall of 2010, it replaced its legacy web content management (WCM) platform with the Ektron platform as part of a major upgrade of the entire e-commerce site.

“To drive sales, we wanted to be less of a book-focused site and [put] more of an emphasis on toys and lifestyle products,” Martel says. “We also wanted more control over the way our brand was reflected on the web.”

Nashua, N.H.-based Ektron provides advanced web content management solutions for high-volume retailers like The Home Depot and Best Buy, as well as a large number of specialty retailers.

“There are lots of changes required to manage web content,” says Tom Wentworth, chief marketing officer for Ektron. “It’s not uncommon for retailers with legacy systems to go through an eight- to 13-week release cycle to put products on sale or add new items. Our platform allows businesses to be more agile, to cut the time down from weeks to days.”

Indigo was specifically seeking a WCM platform that was “more flexible than our legacy system, as well as one that would be able to support significant growth in new categories on our website,” Martel says. After going live with Ektron, the Indigo website enjoyed “double-digit growth in revenue and traffic” during the 2010 holiday shopping season.

Full integration
Martel says the Ektron platform gave Indigo the ability to tailor the platform to its requirements as a specialty retailer.

“Some content management systems are not flexible,” he says. “They’re built in one way and if you want them to operate differently because your business has special needs, you may have to pay for special services to gain that flexibility.

“With Ektron, we didn’t have that issue. We worked within the tool to create what we needed for our business.”

With the legacy WCM platform, Indigo’s merchandisers had to ask IT for help whenever they wanted to alter the merchandising capabilities of the site. “Our legacy tools were very old,” he says. “So old, our IT people did not like working with them. It could take months for us to make the changes we needed. Now the timeline is significantly shorter.”

Ektron’s platform “fits with our technology stack,” Martel says. “We use Microsoft’s .NET as our web development framework, and Ektron’s WCM platform is based on that framework.” What’s more, because .NET is “core to our business, our IT staff did not require any significant additional training. They had the skills to get it up and running quite quickly.”

Unlike many WCM platforms that are sold “out of the box,” the Ektron platform “provided something that we could integrate more fully into our experience,” Martel says.

Indigo relaunched its site a year ago, just four months after signing the deal. The speed of implementation was a major benefit, says Martel, making it possible for Indigo to get its new platform up and running for the crucial Christmas holiday season.

“The Christmas holiday is very important to us and we didn’t want to risk the stability of our site,” he says. “But because of the synergies we achieved from working on a common web development platform and the help we received from Ektron, we felt we could launch in time for the holiday season.”

With Ektron’s help, Indigo had its IT developers working on the implementation ahead of time. “Even before we signed the contract, they were in there looking at it and getting up to speed on how it would operate once we were given the green light,” Martel says.

Ektron also offered training for Indigo’s merchandisers, which took about a week. “Then our merchandisers were able to quickly build pages in preparation for launching the site,” he says.