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Industry: Automotive & Transport Solution: Dynamic Imaging, eCatalogs, eVideos  Challenges:
Griot's Garage was founded nearly twenty years ago by an avid automotive enthusiast, and delivers similar enthusiasts with the finest in car care, tools, garage organization and accessories. The company launched in Vista, California, a small community just north of San Diego, and what started as a three- person outfit producing just one 16-page catalog, quickly became a booming business with retail locations in Washington and Indiana, dealer locations across the United States, and an impressive 66-page "handbook" and robust eCommerce site that reaches millions of car fanatics every year. Best Practices: A desire to both streamline and improve web photo and video publishing processes associated with the eCommerce business led Griot's Garage to the Adobe Scene7 hosted cross-media platform. Ultimately, Griot's was eager to eliminate the need to manually pre-generate multiple sizes of product images, spanning thumbnail, index, and product detail pages across its eCommerce site. The company was also ready to make the customer-facing site more dynamic by adding video as well as interactive product zoom, pan, and magnification features, and was excited to finally feature its 66-page handbook online as an eCatalog, making this (otherwise cumbersome) creation far more accessible to shoppers and available in an easy-to-peruse, user-friendly format. Griot's had been challenged to find a solution provider that could serve all of its needs…until it discovered Scene7. "The Scene7 platform enabled us to address all of the 'must haves' on our list since each solution exists in the out-of-the-box service," said Dell Plagens, eCommerce Manager, Griot's Garage. Identifying Griot's problem areas was "easy enough" for management to do, but finding a solution provider adept at addressing them took some research. Griot's did what savvy businesses should do, it identified the websites that it felt did a great job of presenting products in a rich, dynamic environment and then picked apart the code to discover who was serving the solution. Due diligence paid off and led the company to the Scene 7 solution, whereby Scene7 quickly proved to be the "right choice" for Griot's needs. "Scene7 was a standout choice for us because the platform’s reputation was solid and we knew Scene7 could support the integration with the eCommerce platform we were moving toward," added Plagens. Before Scene7, Griot's Garage would laboriously manage hundreds of high-resolution photos; three different sized photos for each product on the website, and even the height/width ratio that could vary along with different colored backgrounds. With only the ability to display one photo per product, this proved incredibly time-consuming and debilitating to the growth of the site and in meeting customers’ expectations for a rich web experience. Put quite simply, Griot's wasn’t able to maximize the value of its own assets. With the integration of Scene7, a single high-resolution image or video clip is loaded into the Scene7 hosted platform and the platform then handles the rest with each call from the Griot's website. Additionally, by leveraging the Scene7 eCatalogs solution, Griot's is able to feature its comprehensive product handbook online. Scene7 eCatalogs is the only end-to-end solution for easily and cost-effectively creating an enhanced web version of existing printed marketing materials – driving multi-channel sales. Griot's simply uploads its high-resolution pdf files and Scene7 automatically generates and correctly orders the online pages. Users can easily jump to any page, view all pages, and even book- mark a page with their own personal electronic sticky notes. "Using a Software-as-a-Service platform where improvements and enhancements are available at regular intervals, we are able to incorporate new features as needed or in an incremental fashion versus a major project milestone method," said Plagens. "Scene7 has become a seamless part of our workflow and in the few instances we've reached out with a problem or question, the Scene7 support staff has been very quick to respond and is incredibly thorough in answering all of our questions." Results: Car enthusiasts are passionate people and their desire for greater product information and visual imagery led Griot's Garage to make a smart business decision. With the help of Scene7 solutions, Griot's is now able to better showcase its high-quality photography and display multiple alternate and in-use images for each product. For Griot's, ROI has been largely calculated by the tangible reduction of man-hours spent touching and processing each product photo. Beyond improving employee productivity by 50% within the area of image production and management, Griot's also recognized a 30% reduction in costs and a noticeable lift in customer satisfaction. The time customers spent on the site’s product pages increased 10% after rolling out Scene7. Further, shoppers that viewed the eCatalog had a conversion rate more than two times greater than the shoppers that didn't, spent more than twice as much time on the site, and on average viewed twice as many pages per visit. While video has not yet been rolled out pervasively across GriotsGarage.com, nearly a dozen products feature video now, and shoppers who watched video on the site had an average order value 19% higher than those who didn’t watch video, spent nearly four times as much time on the site, and on average viewed nearly three times as many pages per visit. |
