The Company
For more than 59 years, Myron has provided top quality personalized business gifts to hundreds of thousands of businesses across America. As a leader in direct sales of promotional products in the Advertising Specialty Industry, Myron sells products in 9 countries globally, trading under the name Adler in international markets.
The Challenge
Given Myron’s highly successful history of using direct mail and outbound telesales as primary communication channels, the company did not focus on e-commerce as a key priority over the last few years. As a result, as of 2007, Myron’s Web sales represented a fraction of the company’s total activity. To continue growing its business, Myron management decided to further develop its Web presence. However, the existing Web site was built on an aging proprietary platform that was cumbersome and difficult to maintain.
Myron needed a new Web site that would be scalable, better performing, and capable of supporting the personalization and product customization features that are central to the company’s business success. Myron’s unique business model also requires customer-specific, personalized pricing across its entire product line. At precisely the same moment, two customers might see different pricing for the same product, based on their order history, their relationship with Myron, and any special offers that are active at the moment. These complex business rules, along with years of customer account history existed on a separate IBM iSeries system as well as other database servers. The challenge was to provide a customized solution on the Web that leveraged Myron’s existing business logic and assets, while providing a clean and clear user experience.
The Integrator
New Jersey-based, Interactive Media Associates, Inc.(IMA) is an award winning, full service, digital agency providing results driven strategy, design, marketing, development, systems integration and hosting. The company was founded more than 20 years ago, in the pre-Internet days of the consumer online industry. IMA’s reputation for the ability to understand business needs and to develop smart, useable Web applications convinced Myron to partner with them to to build a scalable eCommerce system.
The Solution
IMA recommended Elastic Path as the base eCommerce platform for myron.com because of its extremely customizable architecture. Using a service-oriented approach, IMA and Myron extended ElasticPath to leverage, in real time, data and logic living across Myron’s infrastructure. With a Jboss application layer and Microsoft SQL Server as a backbone, the system provides real-time, individual-based pricing on all screens, up-to-the-minute customer account history, personalization of products before purchase, and real time shipping cost calculations.
The Results
Myron relaunched its Web site in January 2008 with significant improvements in functionality and usability. The site also quickly attained a healthy level of search engine visibility. Using Elastic Path’s Commerce Manager, administrators are able to maintain the site much more efficiently than before. IMA’s personalization engine dramatically decreased the time it takes marketing managers to introduce new product lines with new personalization areas because it no longer requires involving programmers to code for customer input for new surface areas. Partnering with Elastic Path and IMA, Myron feels confident that this new solution will be a major driver in increasing sales, improving maintenance efficiency, and providing a richer user experience on a platform that allows them to reach their Web growth goals.
According to Patrick Caillat, V.P. Global CRM Marketing: “The new Myron Web site is an important part of our commitment to e-commerce, and the Elastic Path solution that IMA helped us implement was a good match for our needs. This new Web platform is much more flexible and user friendly, and will be easier to evolve as we strive to significantly increase the productivity of the Web channel.”
