Guitar Center tunes up seamless experience
Musicians are notoriously individualistic people, and specialty instrument retailer Guitar Center is launching a redesigned website with this user base in mind.
Westlake Village, California-based, 270-store Guitar Center has launched a new redesigned website with a more seamless omnichannel user interface. Based on the current Oracle Commerce platform, the redesign is the result of a two-year initiative that involved customer insight and user experience teams, both of whom worked together with end-users and consultants.
For the customer, the new site offers personalized experience, improved navigation to browse store inventory, search enhancements such as shopping products by store radius, a product page redesign with larger images, clearer layout and pricing, and integrated video content, services pages with enhanced content, and a centralized customer service center.
Additionally, the site features an updated vendor portal allowing Guitar Center to offer its vendor partners more accurate and complete product data. This portal is part of the site’s larger Product Information Management (PIM) upgrade, which offers standardized product information, scalability to support increases in the number of products the system can manage, and consolidation of product data and internal processes to enhance efficiency.
Looking forward, future enhancements will involve native application for iOS and Android, optimization for tablet and mobile experiences, new payment options and more.
“Since launching the site, the responses from both our customers and vendors have been extraordinarily positive, and we’re proud to offer them an innovative and frictionless omnichannel experience,” said Jeff Wisot, VP of marketing and e-commerce for Guitar Center. “Over the next five years, we have plans to continue to enhance and expand the limits of the site to make it as intuitive as possible while providing our customers access to our unrivalled inventory and service, both online and in our brick-and-mortar locations.”
Guitar Center is making a major step toward to offering a true seamless customer experience with its site redesign. Features such as online search of store inventory and by store radius, integrated video, and centralized customer service all help blend channels in a way that meets the needs of the modern customer.
Just as importantly, Guitar Center is extending its site redesign to include improvements in vendor communications and product information management. By ensuring access to product information and availability on the back end is as smooth as access on the front end, Guitar Center is greatly increasing the odds of writing a happy seamless song.