B2B and B2C
Magento
18 Months
visitors in four months trading
over sales target in first 3 months
t
increase in monthly revenue in Australia
The ability to consolidate multiple websites into one global retail platform was key to McGraw-Hill's strategic objectives, they required a single codebase for the business and a centralised administration system for merchandising stock and managing promotions.
Magento Enterprise provides out of the box support for operating multiple websites from a unified codebase so a separate website was created for each associated country. This provided McGraw-Hill with the ability to set an associated base currency, language and relevant payment options depending on the website being viewed.
Using the latest Geo-location services, when a request is made to the McGraw-Hill Education website the user's location is parsed and they are redirected into the correct website which provides a localised browsing experience for their associated region.
Trading as a Global business comes with additional challenges around payments and logistics. Studies such as the E-Commerce Industry Report conclude that the preferred payment options differ widely between geographical regions.
For McGraw-Hill to thrive as a global e-commerce retailer it was vital for the website to not only provide support for multiple currencies but also support multiple different payment options depending on which country the user is located in.
Leveraging the functionality built within Magento Enterprise the following base currencies and payment options were developed.
McGraw-Hill provides their products in multiple different formats including traditional print and ebook formats.
The new website would need to support these widely adopted formats as well as including support for McGraw-Hill's own digital redemption formats such as LearnSmart and Connect+.
CTI extended Magento Enteprise's support for multiple product types to include an intuitive product selector that allows the customer to select whether they would like to purchase a digital or print version of the product.
If the user requests a digital version of a title this will be available to download through the customer's account.
Managing a product catalogue and inventory for over sixty thousand SKU's which are sold in over sixty countries is an inherently complex operation and would require the website to connect to multiple back office systems.
CTI extended Magento Enteprise's built-in support for popular Web Services such as REST and SOAP to include a fully integrated solution to synchronise Orders and Inventory on a defined schedule designed to drastically reduce manual intervention.
Finding the right product, first time, every time with such a large product catalogue is a challenge for any retailer, therefore, it was important the website featured an enterprise level search engine with support for weighting and ranking product attributes.
Using Magento Enteprise's built-in support for Apache SOLR (the enterprise search tool) the website features support for attribute weighting, auto completion of search queries, spelling correction and synonyms configuration. All of these features can be managed via the Magento administration panel reducing support on McGraw's I.T Department.
