Move an existing site to a more powerful platform while preserving solutions developed on the old site.

With the 2011 holiday shopping season approaching, Ten Thousand Villages was ready to make the jump to a new eCommerce platform, but they also wanted to retain and improve the successful email marketing solutions they’d already built. They worked with Magento gold solution partner CorraTech, who in turn worked with Listrak, a Magento industry partner who had helped develop the old site. The combined teams set out to:

• Use Magento’s multi-store capability to move individual stores forward in the mix
• Exploit and expand the gift registry functionality
• Integrate older applications for tracking customer purchases and shopping cart abandonment
• Incorporate inventory information from individual stores into a systemwide inventory for online shoppers

A new face for the company

Taking advantage of Magento Enterprise’s powerful functionality and flexibility, the development teams quickly implemented information sites for more than 70 stores, while at the same time weaving the content tightly together, effectively inventing a new face for the entire company.

• 12 extensions including Listrak for email promotions and Avalara for sales tax management
• Store managers have control over custom pages for their store
• Custom checkout that supports coupons, gift cards, ecards, and credit cards

A better-integrated, more user-friendly site

The new Ten Thousand Villages site brings together a unified online presence for their many stores and alliance stores throughout the U.S. and Canada, with a coherent look and feel for their products, collections, and gift ideas, along with videos and life stories of the artisans. Benefits include:

• A seamless transfer of select systems from the old site
• More than 80 separate sites for individual stores running on the same application
• Product availability by physical store location