Buffalo Technology
Live Oak Helps Technology Marketer Expand Online Presence
The Challenge
Japanese company Buffalo Technology markets computer memory, network storage, wireless and multimedia products in dozens of countries around the world. The company offers a huge variety of technology items through channels such as direct-mail catalogs, ads in industry trade publications and online stores.
Buffalo Technology wanted to expand its online retail presence in the United States, but its Web site was holding the company back. The online store (www.shoptatbuffalotech.com) had several shortcomings, chief among them lack of integration with the company’s inventory and warehouse-management systems. Without a direct tie to products actually in stock, the set of online offerings was limited to the company’s top-selling products. Buffalo wanted to expand sales by offering its full line of products on the Web site.
However, incorporating Buffalo’s full catalog of products into the online store would create site scalability challenges. Buffalo stocks thousands of varieties of products, some with only slight differences. For example, a memory component designed for a specific manufacturer’s motherboard might come in several sizes, from 256 kb to 1 gigabyte, and in DIMM or SDRAM specs. The expanded online store would need to scale up to support all the data associated with each product.
Buffalo had also recently acquired another company, Tech Works, which sold a similar line of technology products focused on Macintosh users. Until the new company’s products could be integrated into the main Web site, Buffalo Technology wanted two separate online stores that would nevertheless share the same shopping-cart engine, the same database and the same content-management tools.
The Solution
Buffalo Technology hired Live Oak 360 to help re-launch its online stores.
Mike Saenz, solutions delivery manager at Live Oak 360, says that the first order of business was tying the online infrastructure to the company’s inventory systems, so the full line of products could be sold.
Next was creating a content-management solution that would allow Buffalo administrators to administer both sites using the same database. “We created tools to let them do their administration in one place, update products there as well as enter the various pricing, shipping and tax scenarios. If both stores carried some of the same products, we gave them a tool to clone the information so they wouldn’t have to enter the same information twice.”
Also key was creation of a shared shopping-cart system that could scale to accommodate the thousands of varieties of products. “Upon initial launch, the sites were running unacceptably slow because of all the processing. We had to tweak the code and optimize the database to ensure that the site ran faster.”
Live Oak also added an enhanced product-search function that lets shoppers search by a number of different keywords, from computer type to manufacturer, item number, size and other descriptors.
The Benefits
There’s been nothing but positive feedback from Buffalo, says Saenz. “Since we tweaked the design, the site’s response time has been incredible. They’re very happy.”
Buffalo Technology subsequently combined the two stores into one – all part of their mission to expand online retail sales in the United States.
