IMA Surges from Corra’s Open Solutions
2 Min Read
International Military Antiques (IMA), the world’s largest retailer of military antiques and collectibles, today announced results from its Website re-launch. [Read Article]. The launch took place just in time for the 2010 holiday shopping season. With the of help two Magento Enterprise partners, Corra and OrderMotion, IMA experienced significant increases in revenue (18%), volume (10%), and conversion rates (56%). “We basically doubled the value of our site by switching to Magento,” said IMA Vice President, Alex Cranmer.
After twenty years of strong sales to collectors through traditional channels via trade shows and quirky catalogs, IMA realized it was time to add ecommerce to the mix. “In 2003 we launched a practical, but limited ecommerce site,” said Cranmer. “The site performed well, but as our traffic, revenue and orders increased by 25% each year, we found that we required a much more robust and scalable online store that could grow with us.” After much research Cranmer selected Magento as the platform for his new site.
After a competitive bidding process, IMA picked open source consulting and implementation firm, Corra, “I knew I could get good design anywhere,” Cranmer said. “But I wanted a strong technology company, not just another interactive agency, to do the work.”
Corra is an Enterprise Partner of Magento and has nearly a decade of experience working with commercial open source software. “After visiting the IMA warehouse and seeing everything from Napoleonic bronze cannons to WW II shaving kits, we knew the IMA site had to be special,” said Ron Bongo, Corra CEO. “Just the sheer number of unique SKUs presented interesting challenges.”
As luck would have it, IMA already had a partnership in place with OrderMotion prior to making the switch to Magento. OrderMotion provides a complete back-end system for processing and managing orders and inventory. Immediately prior to starting the project, OrderMotion launched its Connector for Magento that marries front-end Web analytics with back-end order and inventory data. Once the connector is installed, Magento immediately becomes “aware” of all order and inventory information in the OrderMotion system. “eBusiness sites like IMA with high traffic and large numbers of SKUs that are constantly changing really benefit from the additional scalability and flexibility that our connector adds to Magento,” said OrderMotion CTO, Patrick Puck.
“Because Magento is open source, and because OrderMotion provides a SaaS solution with an open API, our two teams were able to work in parallel,” said Bongo. “This sped up the process and is a great example of what we call Open Solutions: Open source, SaaS, mobile, cloud computing—all working together to form a complete solution.”
Since launching ahead of the Thanksgiving shopping season, IMA’s new site has set sales records across the board. “Revenues are up 18% and order volume is up 10%,” said Cranmer. “But most impressive of all, our conversion rate instantly went from 0.8% to 1.25% and climbing. That almost doubles the value of our site in a single stroke, and all without any of the site and business optimization we are working on with Corra.” “The success IMA is seeing with its new site is a testament to the benefits Magento brings to the ecommerce space,” said Bongo. “The team effort between Corra and OrderMotion shows the power of the open solutions approach.”
____________
For 20 years our strategists, engineers, and UX designers have been building leading-edge ecommerce sites. From the cloud to the edge, we’ll help you make smart decisions and speed time-to-value, whether you’re building from scratch or moving to a new platform.
Corra, a Publicis Sapient company, is the global commerce leader and SI helping brands and organizations grow by evaluating, building, and optimizing their digital commerce ecosystems. Our vast experience with composable and headless implementations speeds time-to-value and provides technical freedom to our clients. Our TotalCare managed services program provides gold-standard support, enhancements and ongoing commerce strategy. We are strategic thinkers, accomplished engineers, and award-winning experience designers. We believe outstanding customer experiences can’t exist without flawless technology, and that flawless technology is pointless without beautiful, human-centered design. Our clients are an integral part of our team. Together, we remove the obstacles that are limiting growth and discover new opportunities. We don’t rest until our clients achieve their full potential. Our clients’ KPIs are our KPIs. We have 20 years of experience in commerce technology, but we also know that customer expectations are constantly evolving. For this reason, we’ve built future-proof solutions and refined an agile execution process that helps our clients achieve more with less. As a Publicis Sapient company, Corra joins a global network spanning 20,000 people with 53 offices around the world enabling us to accelerate our clients’ businesses through designing and building the experiences and services their customers demand.
