Music Direct Builds a Studio-Grade Site with BigCommerce

SOLUTION

Freedom to build a custom payment processing system.

One of the primary reasons Music Direct chose to host its site on BigCommerce was because of its robust API capabilities, which enabled it to build a custom payment processing system.

Music Direct processes payments through tokenisation to enhance the site’s security and minimise the amount of customer data it needs to store.

Few payment gateways support payment tokenisation, and even fewer are compatible with Music Direct’s ERP, so the business required a platform that could support the tools needed to build its offline payment processing system.

Thankfully, BigCommerce’s Open SaaS architecture gave Music Direct complete freedom to build a custom integration that transformed its payment processing vision into reality.

“With BigCommerce’s API functionality, we were able to build exactly what we needed. When an order comes in, webhooks trigger our integration, which goes back to BigCommerce with an API call and grabs transactional information. With that information, it reaches out to our payment gateway — authorized.net — grabs tokens, and sends them to our ERP system so we can process the order,” explained Shapiro.

To learn how to build this integration, Shapiro and his team worked with a BigCommerce Solutions Architect.

“Our Solutions Architect was instrumental in designing the tokenisation integration. He outlined the process we needed to use and recommended how we implement it, which was extremely helpful,” remarked Shapiro.

Creating custom features to enhance the UX.

In addition to building customisations designed for backend functions, Music Direct has also created custom integrations designed to improve the user experience.

To make customers aware of the inventory status of products, the company built a feature that tells shoppers if an item is out of stock. If Music Direct already placed the restock order with the manufacturer, additional information will appear on the product page informing customers. This way, shoppers can feel comfortable purchasing an item that is technically out of stock and know they’ll still receive it in a standard timeframe — encouraging sales.

“We built a way of displaying back orders so customers can buy things that are out of stock and not treat them specifically like pre-orders. To do this, we built custom availability calls and a way to flag something as out of stock versus in stock. When shopping on our site, something that's out of stock might display information that says that it’s technically out of stock, but an order has been placed with the manufacturer, so customers can still purchase the product and receive it in a reasonable amount of time,” explained Shapiro.

Amplifying the site with native features and apps.

While Music Direct takes advantage of the ability to build custom integrations, the business also enjoys BigCommerce’s variety of native tools and apps.

Particularly, they like features designed to cater to their different customer markets, such as customer groups and price lists.

“We have a price list for retail and a price list for wholesale. If you're in the wholesale customer group, you get the wholesale price list, and if you're in the retail customer group, you get the retail price list. This has really helped streamline processes and improve the customer experience,” said Shapiro.

Since migrating platforms, BigCommerce has introduced Music Direct to different technical features designed to optimise their site and back-end processes. One of these includes ShipperHQ, which enables the business to build shipping rules and promotions.

“We can create a lot of cool shipping rules and promotions that we've never been able to build before. Now, we're offering free shipping promotions and pickup options. ShipperHQ is definitely one of the coolest things we've been exposed to since moving to BigCommerce,” remarked Shapiro.

Music Direct is also in the process of implementing Klaviyo and Searchspring, which will assist with email marketing and search.

“We're pretty excited about Klaviyo and Searchspring. BigCommerce’s ability to integrate with these tools will allow us to create really cool dynamic, personalised emails and product recommendations,” said Shapiro.