Page 9 - CBM11

~ Intershop ~

As one of the largest musical instrument and acces- are now able to show products with different VAT prices in
sories sellers, how do you instil a personal touch for all countries in Europe, which expanded our reach of selling
your customers? Don’t they prefer the local music on an international scale by a great deal. While working
store, where they can hold a new guitar? with this platform solution, we were able to be online 24/7.
‘For a shop the size of ours, it can be very hard to provide Even during our highest peaks, for example during Black
each customer with a very tailored , personal experience. Friday, we manage to handle all requests and order without
The way we have constructed our business, based on the the shop falling to its knees.’
catalogue, and online and brick shops, has enabled us to do
this to a certain extent, although we are still limited. For How do you deal with cross-border differences?
example, we can only enter one kind of foreword in our ‘Having the amount of Stock Keeping Unites we are selling,
catalogue. We do look heavily into the kinds of emails we we heavily rely on a tool that helps us display all prices
send. I answer every email from customers myself and spend correctly in all countries. To supply so many countries
a lot of time in the shop talking to customers. That way, we with different national languages is a big challenge, too.
are still well able to interact with customers and get a good Right now, we have managed to achieve this for our most
understanding of what they expect and desire from us. important selling destinations. It is where 90% of our sales
are generated, so we are well underway to complete this.
What was it like to switch from an offline strategy to As mentioned, the display of correct prices without tax
both an offline and online, multichannel, strategy? in all countries is important, whether these countries are
‘We switched too late to a multichannel model when the in or outside the EC. With the aid of our platform, we
online business was are in control of this. In
starting up. While we left Portugal, we show a range
a lot of turnover behind, of categories with different
business really took off “ THESE DAYS, WE ARE Another benefit is that
VAT-rates, for example.
we were running with
what we had. Our online
we can display different
we also started to sell EVEN RECEIVING MORE sliders and banners on
when we partnered with
our shops in different
Intershop. Afterwards,
countries where prices are
through platforms like dynamic and automatically
Google and Amazon.’ AND MORE ORDERS displayed in the correct
currency and with the
Any challenges there? correct VAT rate. As this
‘For us, it was a drastic FROM FAR-REACHING can be very complicated to
change to get started do so within all European
with Intershop, but countries, we are delighted
DESTINATIONS LIKE
we believed that it to be able to do this. Our
could really benefit our price tool checks up to
business. About three 200,000 prices per day
CHINA.”
years ago, we changed and automatically assigns
to a new version of the them to our competitors
platform, which offered according to certain
us the opportunity to use rules. The tool ejects
big sliders on our home conspicuous divergences
page. Intershop offered for manual control, which
responsive design, with article pages that were structured gives us the benefit of controlling our prices even more.
like a printed catalogue and many other features which These days, we are even receiving more and more orders
appealed to us. It has helped us a lot to realise a strong from far-reaching destinations like China.’
sales increase once again. Currently, we are in the process
of upgrading to the latest version. This again has many Where do you see Music Store in five years?
advantages and is something we are looking forward to.’ ‘Considering our current business development, we continue
to grow slowly but steadily, expanding very cautiously
What is it like to sell cross-border? And how did while always keeping an eye on costs. In the future, we
Music Store achieve this? will enter other marketplaces besides Amazon and Google,
‘Selling cross-border was a lot of work to set up. We wanted as some countries have a number of very special national
to do this through our own platform and were finally able to marketplaces we have our sights set on.’ ••
achieve this with the help of Intershop. On our platform, we

9