Case Study: Chicago Music Exchange
An Information Architecture Overhaul Using Shopify Tags
In January of 2014, I was working as the Director of Marketing and eCommerce for Chicago Music Exchange, an iconic guitar shop specializing in the sale of new, used and vintage musical instruments (particularly guitar gear). The brick-and-mortar store attracted shoppers and aficionados from all over, including many of the world’s biggest rock stars. The ecommerce store was an extension of that experience.
THE PROBLEM
For CME, the Q4 holiday season accounted for a majority of annual sales and we had just survived the 2013 rush with a few bumps and bruises. We knew that in order to continue growing in 2014, we would have to re-platform the website (from BigCommerce).
It was past time for a design refresh. BigC was limiting our flexibility in building product category pages for the purpose of SEO. Plus, at the time it was impossible to assign attributes directly to products, which was a huge problem considering how many attributes a musical instrument might have. For example — guitar, electric, semi-hollow, 1960, gibson, es335, vintage, used, sunburst, 6-string, 22 frets, right-handed, rosewood fretboard…to name a few.
This was an opportunity to restructure the product data and information architecture of the site in a way that would give our tiny marketing team more power, improved speed and agility, and more accurate data.
CHOOSING SHOPIFY
After researching alternative platforms, everyone agreed that Shopify would be the best solution. There were many features to consider, but these advantages stood out:
Tag-based product attributes that could be leveraged for smart categorization, product recommendations, and related content suggestions
Ability to stand up sales and promotions quickly while easily managing important vendor and conditional exclusions
Seamless integrations with other systems: email marketing, digital ads, inventory management, accounting, shipping, and customer service
THE PROJECT
Stakeholder Interviews
I started this project by speaking to the colleagues who would be impacted. That meant basically every department — from the sales team and customer service, to accounting, shipping, product listing specialists, buyers, and inventory managers. I created a project plan and checklist that would address each area of need.
Design Pragmatism
At first we were planning to completely redesign the look and feel of the website as part of the re-platforming, but we soon realized this would slow us down. Instead, we decided that Step 1 would be to rebuild the website without redesigning — simply mimic the existing layouts and styles.
Make the move — then worry about iterating on design.
This approach allowed us to focus solely on logistics for the launch without agonizing over design decisions that deserved more thoughtful discussion and iterative testing.
Tagging System
The tagging system was the backbone of our Shopify store. I worked closely with our product experts to create an “attribute spreadsheet” that organized all possible tags by product category into one document. From there, it was relatively simple for product listing specialists to use the spreadsheet to copy-paste tags as they added new products to the website.
These tags would power product category pages, related product recommendations, product page upsells, sale exclusions, related articles, and pretty much all dynamic content.
The Checklist
I had a detailed checklist for this project and almost every team member played a part in getting us to the finish line.
We moved over 12k SKUs from BigCommerce to Shopify via csv imports.
A designer configured all 17 Shopify page templates and 11 email templates.
I reworked copy for category, vendor, blog, and info pages to better serve SEO targets.
I created fresh content for the triggered email campaigns.
We connected all of our 3rd party services and tested rigorously.
I set up 301 redirects as needed.
After about 8 weeks, we flipped the switch to the new website…
THE RESULT
The launch was successful! We began to enjoy the fruits of our labor immediately:
Increased organic website traffic by 120% in one year (2013-2014)
Increased ecommerce revenue by 200% in one year (2013-2014)
Increased overall revenue by 125% in one year, from $8.5mm to $19.1mm (2013-2014)
Made the 2015 INC 5000 List of Fastest Growing Companies in America
*In 2017, Chicago Music Exchange moved the website again, this time to the “Reverb Sites” platform (as part of a parent-company partnership and beta test). Today, CME is back on Shopify but the website design is completely different from the one I facilitated. Much of the content and IA was changed and lost in that process.