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Electronic Commerce Case Study

Client:	The Beat Goes On
Industry:	Consumer Retail, Music & Movies
Project:	Inventory ordering and reservation system

The company
The Beat Goes On is a chain of retail stores that provides customers with a comfortable environment for purchasing new and used CDs and DVDs and for selling items that they don't use anymore. They currently operate 11 locations in Ontario and are expanding aggressively.

They have operated a successful web site for a number of years, and approached Emerge2 Digital in 2001 for hosting, web design and application development services.

The challenge
The inventory at The Beat Goes On is in a constant state of flux. Each store relies on customers to bring in their old CDs and DVDs and they never know what to expect from one day to the next.

For a customer on the hunt for a particular title, this required that they manually search through inventory on a regular basis to find desired titles. This was a reasonable activity for searches involving a small number of products. However, for music and movie collectors (an important part of BGO's market), constantly searching for many titles was at best an unwieldy process, and at worst, a problem that resulted in lost sales.

The solution
To solve these challenges, Emerge2 designed and developed an online Wish List application. Customers using this feature can search through The Beat Goes On's entire catalog of CDs and DVDs and store out-of-stock titles in a personalized list. Or, if a title is in-stock, they can place an order and have it delivered to one of the retail locations for pick-up.

On a nightly basis, the web site's inventory is updated from each of the retail locations. If any of the new inventory matches any items in a customer's Wish List, that customer is immediately notified by e-mail and they are provided with a link to order that title from their Wish List.

For managing in-coming orders, The Beat Goes On was furnished with a private administration tool that allows them to track and fulfill the orders that have been placed.

The result
As a result of this system, The Beat Goes On is able to increase move inventory at a faster rate and is able to retain sales from customers who would have looked elsewhere for titles in the past. In addition, the data collected from individual Wish Lists allows The Beat Goes On to track the most popular requests (there have been some big surprises!) and ensure that inventory is brought in to fill that need.

As for customers, the response to the Wish List and ordering system has been outstanding. Within a month after launch, hundreds of customers created Wish Lists containing well over 6,000 individual items and it continues to grow at a rapid rate. Matches are made on a daily basis resulting in a very high percentage of customers submitting orders for the items from their list.

Services provided:

Web site design

Application development

Application hosting

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