Adobe Success Story

· To design a rich e-commerce experience.
· To offer administrative functionality, including content management, sales reporting, inventory control, order process and fulfillment, and membership information.

Benefits

· 100% improvement in site performance.
· Page views climbed to one million a day.
· Registered users have neared 100,000.
· E-commerce revenues have doubled since launch and order sizes have increased.

Project Details

Offering one of the broadest assortments of digital cameras, subnotebook and handheld computers (including the acclaimed CASSIOPEIA), wristwatches, calculators, musical keyboards, portable TVs, and other consumer electronics, Casio USA is a must-visit site for serious Web shoppers. In just three years, the site has grown dramatically, serving up millions of page views each week.

Today, buyers can browse through thousands of SKUs, make purchases online, and track the progress of their orders—all through a sophisticated Web site built by Pipeline Interactive.

According to Michael McCormick, Internet services manager for Casio, the company's first-generation site was less ambitious in scope and scale. "Initially, we had a very basic Web site that was purely written in HTML," he said. "There was very little content on the site and there was a small e-commerce page that was actually driven by a third-party service. It was an OK site, but not the kind of breakthrough experience we were hoping to offer our customers. We initiated a complete revamping of the site to take our e-commerce efforts to the next level."

With its partner, Pipeline Interactive, Casio began to design a more sophisticated site that could offer a richer e-commerce experience. That design centered on Able Commerce, a ColdFusion-based commercial solution that provides a complete e-commerce storefront infrastructure. Pipeline Interactive then wrote a variety of administrative tools to support the site and manage the transactions. Soon, however, it was time to take the site even further.

"We were constantly asking Pipeline Interactive to tweak the Able Commerce solution," McCormick explained. "It was a near-constant stream of revisions and customizations. Soon enough, we'd made so many changes that it really wasn't Able Commerce any more. By January 2000, we decided to rewrite the site entirely and chose Macromedia as our development platform."

Casio's implementation featured Macromedia ColdFusion, the solution for building and deploying powerful Web applications. ColdFusion helps dramatically accelerate Web development with its intuitive tag-based language and integrated database and debugging tools. ColdFusion also includes a powerful Web application server, featuring an open architecture that allows for complete integration with existing enterprise systems, as well as easy-to-use management tools and server clustering to ensure applications perform optimally and are always available. Casio also used Macromedia Flash to create for low-bandwidth animations and Macromedia Fireworks for graphics creation and optimization as well as for interface design and illustration.

According to Denny Miller, president of Pipeline Interactive, the decision to use ColdFusion was very easy. "The Able Commerce module is a ColdFusion application," he noted, "so we already had extensive experience with ColdFusion. When we decided to build our own system, we recognized that ColdFusion would be the ideal platform because it provides rapid development, scalability, and tremendous power. We also liked the reusability of various code modules we'd created previously. The fact is, we just know that when we need to crank out something quickly that will be durable and reliable, we can turn to ColdFusion and succeed."

Better User Experience—Fast, Reliable, and Feature Rich

A 15-person team at Pipeline Interactive—including designers, developers, QA testers, and other professionals—completed the upgrade of the Casio site in approximately five months. The new version features not only a completely customized e-commerce storefront written in ColdFusion, but also a much wider range of administrative functionality, including content management, sales reporting, inventory control, order process and fulfillment, and membership information.

"At least half of our development effort went into improving our back-end administrative infrastructure," McCormick said. "Because it's 100% ColdFusion, we were able to deploy much faster than with Active Server Pages. When we launched, there was a lot of pressure internally because we were migrating to a completely custom-developed system. It had to work well and there wasn't a lot of time."

The results have been spectacular for Casio: Page views climbed to one million a day, Registered users have neared 100,000 and e-commerce revenues have doubled with the new site. Order sizes are climbing as well. McCormick attributes the success to a couple of factors.

"Quite simply, there's much more functionality in the site," he said. "Probably the most important addition is the ability for us to cross-sell and upsell when customers make a purchase. For example, we can cross-sell a printer when someone buys a digital camera. Or we can suggest additional ink cartridges when someone buys a printer. If a particular SKU isn't in stock, suggest substitute products that are similar—perhaps a different color. We've also implemented a robust order-tracking feature that lets customers know where their orders stand in the shipping process. Most important, we have add more marketing content to all our products and accessories.

"We've also created different segments of the site for Personal, Business, and Education to simplify the buyer's experience. It makes it easier to navigate to different product categories and get information faster. We designed that interface and navigational structure after we conducted several focus groups."

Pipeline Interactive's Miller noted the key role that Macromedia Fireworks played in the development of the site's visual interface. Fireworks lets designers create, edit, and animate Web graphics using a complete set of bitmap and vector tools.

"Initially, we design our site storyboards in Photoshop and then import those files into Fireworks," Miller said. "We use Fireworks to breakdown the image into components, name them and add small animations and roll-overs. Then, we bring that to ColdFusion where one of our programmers implements the interface into the site and ties it into the back end. We really like Fireworks because it's easy to use and it's great for optimizing the tradeoffs between image size, image quality, and site performance. It's been a very useful tool for us."

The content management features are a significant feature for the Casio team, McCormick said. "We can maintain the site content ourselves, rather than pushing that to Pipeline Interactive. We can change pictures, descriptions, prices, promotions, and other aspects of the site independently and that lets Pipeline concentrate on taking our site to the next level, rather than lower-level maintenance work."

Performance characteristics of the Casio site have also improved with the new upgrade. "Even with more content and images loading in the browser, we've seen a 100% improvement in our speed," said Miller. "We've been monitoring, analyzing, and optimizing our code and we reconfigured the server farm as well at the suggestion of our hosting provider. Before, we had as much as 25% downtime."

In the coming months, Casio also plans to use ColdFusion to add several new features, including virtual bundling of different promotional packages, electronic software delivery, and multiple warehouse shipping for faster customer deliveries.

Site Summary

Casio USA
570 Mt. Pleasant Ave.
Dover, NJ 07801

Macromedia products: ColdFusion Enterprise 4.5; ColdFusion Studio 4.5.1; Macromedia Flash 5; ; Macromedia Fireworks 4

Hardware: 11 Compaq servers including Proliant DL380, DL570 and DL 580 - Two and four processor servers with 800 MHz processors, 36 GB storage, and 2 to 4 GB RAM.

Operating system: Microsoft Windows NT 4.0

Database: Microsoft SQL Server 7

Size of DB: 2 GB

Internet Connection: Burstable to 4.5 Mbps

Development Team: 15 professionals total: 1 lead developer, 1 project manager, 7 developers, 1 system architect, 5 interface designers

Site Traffic:: 1 million page views per day

Benefits of Macromedia:

Rapid Development—"ColdFusion makes it easy to develop robust features very quickly."

Performance/Scalability—"We've increased both the scope of our site and cut our response times in half."

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