Warners Group Publications PLC
Challenge
Warners Group Publications PLCWarners’ magazine titles serve a wide range of niche hobbies and interests such as tabletop gaming, to cooking, railways and arts and crafts. These audiences represented a ready market for products carefully curated to appeal to these enthusiasts and selected to help them to pursue their passion.
To allow Warners to offer these products a powerful, all-purpose ecommerce platform was required. The system they selected would need to allow the publisher to encompass the vast array of differing interests with a central hub that delivered an intuitive marketplace for an expanding range of Warners’ offerings. This would serve as a guide for users and customers to individual sites and marketplaces where the portfolio of brands could present a seamless shopping experience that was relevant to their customer-base. Warners selected Adobe’s powerful Commerce Cloud ecommerce platform as the system of choice. Its rich functionality offered much of the functionality they required to merchandise their products out of the box, with a range of third-party extensions to provide additional features where required. Unlike many Software-as-a-Service systems, Adobe Commerce Cloud also allows bespoke development, so the platform could be customised to meet Warners’ precise requirements.
Client: Warners Group Publications PLC
WebSite: www.hooluh.co.uk
Our Solution
Adobe recommended Magium Commerce as the ideal development partner to deliver this project. With over 12 years working alongside publishers such as Hearst, Bauer Media, Immediate Media, Dennis Publishing and DC Thomson, and with a track record in working with Adobe’s Commerce Cloud, Magium was able to add this experience in crafting a first-class solution.
Working with Warners began with a vital consultation phase. As a complex project, Magium this in-depth consultation allowed Magium to better understand the business goals of the business as well as determining any specific needs to be taken into account before beginning the design and development process. Magium provided detailed documentation for all phases of the project, enabling consistently delivery of a solution that is right for the client from beginning to end. It also gave the opportunity to provide its own insights garnered from years of experience and deliver Magium’s expertise to create a solution offering maximum performance and growth.
Following the initial consultation, Magium was able to determine an effective strategy for achieving Warners’ ecommerce strategy. Following the mapping out the solution, a centralised hub and multisite approach was architected. Magium’s solution also established which of the expansive range of features and capabilities that the platform offers were required, what extensions from the Adobe Marketplace were needed and identifying areas for custom development.
In addition to the platform, the build incorporated a significant amount of integration to and from third-party distributors whose products Warners wanted to surface on its audience-specific sites. Magium is an integration specialist and has a wealth of experience in delivering complex joined-up systems passing data seamlessly between business systems and providing smooth, efficient workflows. Each distributor had differing product feeds they could offer so Magium needed to specify how these integrations were best integrated into the platform.
A single back-end hub was built to provide centralised management of the individual Warners brand websites. These sites provided a unique marketplace for hobby and industry-specific products. This multi-platform approach allowed Warners to service a multitude of different audiences with complete relevance, whilst maintaining an easy-to-manage system on the business side for smooth trading and intuitive marketing.
Results
The project enables Warners to deliver an impressive digital experience for all of their customers. The multisite functionality allows precise targeting of audiences whilst a centralised back-end keeps all operations efficient behind the scenes. Hooluh serves as the main hub for the different Warners brands, and the individual sites for three of those brands have already been launched – Food Heaven, Tabletop Gaming, and World of Railways. Additional suppliers are being added on an ongoing basis to provide a rich product set and additional shopfronts are planned to widen the range of products sold.
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