About Ginza
Ginza has been selling music and film for over 40 years, and is today one of Sweden's largest e-commerce companies. Every week Ginza sends out over 15000 packages to over 500000 customers. To always put the customer experience in focus and listen to what the customer has to say and to adapt to this is something that has permeated Ginza from the beginning. This is one of the success factors that have enabled Ginza to have a large and loyal clientele. Ginza was a catalog company in the beginning, but their sales have extensively moved to the Internet. However, the printed catalog is an important complement and is sent out in over 150000 copies every month. Background

Ginza has since 1999 managed e-commerce on Wipcore’s platform, e-Business, and Brightstep has help Ginza with e-commerce consulting since 2002. Ginza is well acquainted with how to effectively work with e-commerce and what was required to implement a new platform. Ginza chose to upgrade to Wipcore’s new platform Enova for several reasons:
- Ginza’s range of products and customer base are increasing day by day so that it was at bursting point for what the existing platform managed.
- They needed a stable platform to keep their customer satisfaction up and to minimize sales drops due to downtime of the e-commerce site.
- They needed to switch to a new platform that is capable of integrating more modern technologies such as Ajax in a good way.
- The platform that Ginza used would soon no longer be supported. So to ensure a stable and secure environment they needed to upgrade the existing platform.

Project scope
The project included a migration from the e-commerce platform e-Business to Enova. The new site would include at least all the functionality that was on the existing site and also some improvements would be made on the e-commerce site. This involved, for example, inviting visitors to contribute with content in the form of grades and comments.

A completely new page design would also be developed to create a greater experience for visitors. However, it was important to retain the existing structure so that loyal Ginza customers would feel at home.

Objectives:
• A more efficient administration of the system will improve profitability.
• A more effective merchandising on the site will increase conversion rate.
• The new platform will make it easier and cheaper to integrate other systems, but also provide the ability to expand the e-commerce site with additional features in a more efficient way.
• An intelligent e-commerce that is showing higher relevance for the individual visitor will increase customer satisfaction.

The result
The project was implemented with the help of Brightsteps methodology for e-commerce projects. To ensure that the end result would be as good as possible, we put in a more iterative approach to the project’s daily routine. As the site grew, we tested it both with the help of internal resources and also with customers from Ginza’s target audience. In this way, we received continuous feedback on the features and design. This led to the prioritization of features and arrangement of the design was modified as the project was progressing. This resulted that the final outcome was far from the first specification we decided on in the early phase with Ginza. A further step in this customer-driven development was to invite visitors to a beta version of the site which was run in parallel with the old site. This allowed for further adjustments before the actual launch. This type of deployment has also led to a perfect test environment because it was possible to purchase goods in the usual way. This meant that once we launched the site in full version at ginza.se the new site had been tested not only operationally but also in terms of performance.

Future
In association with the launch, we made it possible for customers to easily provide feedback to Ginza on site design and functionality by a voice of the costumer system. Ginza will use this information to decide on further development of the site and any new functionality will be developed from their own and loyal customers. Brightstep believes this customer-driven change is the best way to work with changes on an e-commerce site. We hope that Ginza is pleased with its new platform and that we will continue our close and enjoyable cooperation for a long time and that together we will make Ginza the leading e-retailer in Sweden.