Guitar Center, the world’s largest instrument retailer, has launched its new redesigned website at www.guitarcenter.com. The new site offers a more seamless omni-channel user interface, along with increased scalability, stability and performance. Based on the current Oracle Commerce platform, the site now communicates more directly and efficiently with the rest of the Guitar Center enterprise – offering a more effective, intuitive and beneficial experience for customers, Guitar Center employees and vendor partners alike.
The redesign is the result of a two-year initiative that involved customer insight and user experience teams, both of whom worked together with end users and consultants, performing in-depth research on what current and future Guitar Center customers are looking for when browsing the GC site. Additionally, the teams did in-depth research on over 40 “best-practice” websites, to develop an optimized user interface regardless of browser or platform.
For the customer, the new site offers the following features: personalization of the customer’s experience, improved navigation to browse store inventory, search enhancements (for instance, the ability to shop products by store radius), a product page redesign (larger images, clean layout, clear pricing and integrated video content), Services pages with enhanced content, a centralized Customer Service Center, and the ability to let customers transact with GC in the manner that best suits their needs.
Additionally, the site features an updated Vendor Portal, allowing Guitar Center to offer its vendor partners more accurate and complete product data. This portal is part of the site’s larger Product Information Management (PIM) upgrade, which offers standardized product information, scalability to support significant increases in the number of products the system can manage, and consolidation of product data and internal processes to enhance efficiency.
Looking forward, future enhancements will involve native application for iOS and Android, optimization for tablet and mobile experiences, new payment options and much more.
“Guitar Center is a dynamic, fast-moving company, and Oracle Retail solutions strongly support the kind of business agility and flexibility that is so important in today’s commerce anywhere environment across brands and countries,” said Jill Puleri, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle Retail.
“Since launching the site, the responses from both our customers and vendors have been extraordinarily positive, and we’re proud to offer them an innovative and frictionless omni-channel experience,” said Jeff Wisot, Vice President of Marketing and E-Commerce for Guitar Center. “Over the next five years, we have plans to continue to enhance and expand the limits of guitarcenter.com to make it as intuitive as possible while providing our customers access to our unrivalled inventory and service, both online and in our 270-plus brick-and-mortar locations.”
Guitar Center’s Oracle deployment also includes Oracle E-Business Suite Financials, Oracle Service Cloud and Oracle Database, which were developed and supported by AAXIS Commerce, an Oracle Partner Network (OPN) Advanced Specialized Partner for Oracle Commerce.