Enabling e-commerce while retaining brand identity
Vitec Videocom is the global market leader supplying high-end camera accessories. Its equipment forms the backbone of the broadcasting industry and can be found on the sets of most major Hollywood blockbuster films and television series.
Vitec’s diverse product range covers lighting, batteries, teleprompters, remote camera solutions, fluid heads, monitors, wireless transmitters, flight cases, bags, and many other camera accessories. Each product line comes from a specialist manufacturer that operates under the Vitec Videocom umbrella while retaining its own distinct brand identity.
Vitec Videocom brands include: Anton/Bauer, Autocue, Autoscript, Bexel, Camera Corps, Litepanels, OConnor, Sachtler, SmallHD, Teradek, Paralinx, The Camera Store, Vinten and Vinten Radamec.
Magnolia provided a strong platform to start bringing these brands together, allowing Vitec to reap economies of scale for e-commerce, while letting each brand retain its unique identity.
The challenge
A consistent approach to selling products online
As a company that has grown rapidly through acquisitions, Vitec Videocom identified consistency as the key to promoting its sub-brands and selling products on the web.
Detailed analysis showed that its websites varied in terms of branding, functionality, technology platform, hosting infrastructure and support solutions. Vitec Videocom was not achieving the economies of scale or return on investment that should be possible by acting as a consolidated group of companies.
In addition to building a unified solution for website management, it was important for Vitec to have standard e-commerce features such as product information management (PIM), checkout flow, intelligent search, merchandising and search engine optimization. These features had to be readily available to all brands, as and when they were added to the platform.
As with any global brand, the system needed strong multi-lingual and multi-currency capabilities. It also had to be able to deliver several brand sites, on different domains, under a centrally managed platform.
Implementation provider Priocept’s challenge was to deliver an enterprise e-commerce solution that would integrate seamlessly with Vitec Videocom’s existing internal business systems, present a brochure-quality shop front, ensure new websites could be rapidly launched at minimal cost, and allow each site to maintain its unique brand identity.
This was an ambitious new platform build that set out to use technology as a way of consolidating costs and functionality across our increasingly disparate portfolio. By creating consistent website implementations across our many sub-brands, Priocept and Magnolia have helped us to remove the expense of developing and supporting different systems for diverse websites, markets and products.
The solution
Multi-site e-commerce on a single digital platform
Priocept developed a multi-site e-commerce platform for Vitec Videocom to consolidate its brand websites onto a single digital platform. The solution comprises the following components and features:
- Magnolia was at the heart of the multi-site platform due to its extensibility and scalability. As the leading implementation partner for Magnolia in the UK, Priocept could leverage its experience to customize the CMS to suit Vitec Videocom’s requirements.
- Magnolia provides a single interface for managing multiple brand websites hosted on different domains. It also enables full re-use of content and features across each brand website and allows granular configuration of SEO features such as re-directs, metatags, URL structure, tag management and sitemaps.
- Product Information Management (PIM) was implemented using the Magnolia platform to give content editors a user-friendly interface for managing products and categories. Under-the-hood, product data is stored using the Java Content Repository (JCR), with search capabilities powered by Apache Solr.
- The platform incorporates multi-brand features that provide a seamless shopping experience across all of Vitec’s sites. This includes cross-sell and up-sell functionality to intelligently recommend related and featured products across the full catalog.
- Magnolia was integrated with existing Vitec Videocom systems such as Salesforce CRM, Eloqua Marketing Automation, and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP) systems, which are used to manage product pricing and stock-level information.
- The system allows sales to be fulfilled via Vitec Videocom’s partners. To manage this, Magnolia was integrated with Shopatron to handle payment processing and order fulfilment from distributed suppliers.
The result
A solution that combines enterprise WCM and e-commerce functionality
By building Vitec’s digital platform using Magnolia, Priocept was able to develop a solution that combines enterprise web content management and e-commerce functionality. Priocept crafted a solution for Vitec Videocom that consolidated its brand websites onto a single platform and allowed it to promote the entire product catalog.
As further brands are brought onto the system, the costs for hosting, licensing, development, maintenance and support are all being consolidated and reduced while sales are steadily increasing.
By engineering an efficient technical solution around Magnolia enterprise CMS, Priocept solved Vitec Videocom’s business problems and delivered a system that immediately started generating a return on investment.