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Case Studies - BTR Direct

Established in Brighton in 2004, BTR Direct sells DVDs and Blue Ray Discs online to predominantly UK clients. BTR Direct offers a good range and competitive prices in its back catalogue, including old TV shows and "deleted" titles. Its products are also available from eBay and Amazon.

What challenges did BTR Direct need to resolve?

Operating in a competitive market, BTR Direct's range wasn’t large enough to satisfy the varied demand of online buyers. Peter Morgan, their MD, wanted to broaden their online catalogue and offer classic movies, as well as blockbusters, independent films, TV series, children's cartoons and sports DVDs.

The management and staff at BTR Direct, however, realised that the way the business was being operated prevented these essential changes.

The online catalogue was manually maintained and each new product had to be added individually to the database, meaning that it took 5 to 10 minutes each time to update content, images, prices and other information. Under these circumstances, BTR Direct knew that expanding the catalogue meant they had to hire new staff.

"I wanted to keep the structure light and flexible," says Peter. "So, the solution was to automate the whole process with as little human intervention as possible, and furthermore with no increased operating cost".

To resolve part of the problem, BTR Direct found a specialised provider from whom they could acquire content to populate the films and star name database used on the site. This left BTR with the need to find a new web technology that would bring the automated solution to life.

The Solution

BTR Direct consulted Brighton based web agencies because they wanted their service providers to be within easy reach. They chose White Hat Media as they felt reassured that an open source based solution would give them flexibility whilst guarantying the future of their online business operation.

Using the latest open source technologies, White Hat Media proposed a solution to BTR that would enable them to:

Perform a daily update of all products and star name database automatically by importing an XML feed generated by the content provider. The XML feed adds new products and updates existing entries.
Export prices and stock levels from their office database and easily update the products on the server as often as required.
Run instant promotional campaigns, by simply promoting a product to the home page (a function within the CMS), and making the necessary price changes.

The new ecommerce site was built using Drupal CMS and Ubercart, along with a mix of standard and custom modules. It was launched in August 2009.

The Business Benefits

65,000 products now automatically available

Thanks to the technology integrated into their new site by White Hat Media, BTR Direct has been able to increase their product catalogue from 1000 to 65,000 products. The initial data import generated over 100,000 pages including products and star names. Each night an XML update feed is downloaded from a remote server and imported into the site, adding new products and star names and updating old ones. There are around 300-1000 updates each night.

Peter comments: "Apart from the feed subscription, our cost structure has not changed. We actually put less time in updating the site than we did previously."

An enhanced online customer experience

The size of the new catalogue required a solid search module to facilitate browsing. For this purpose an Apache Solr search module has been added. As 300 to 1000 pages are being added every night, these new (or updated) pages need indexing. The search module performs this automatically by controlled batches so as to avoid any knock-on effect on the site performance.

Inbuilt Search Engine Optimisation

White Hat Media took care of structuring the page content to be optimised for search engines. After each database update and search index, XML sitemap, as well as Google Merchant (formerly known as Google base), feeds are generated. These guarantee that the latest site updates are taken into account in SERPs, in particular Google.

"The automation has given us a definite edge on the competition", says Peter. "White Hat Media have been great at understanding our requirements and built a superb solution that met both our needs and our budget!"