Guitar Center has launched its new redesigned Web site at guitarcenter.com. The site offers a more seamless omni-channel user interface, along with increased scalability, stability and performance. Based on the current Oracle Commerce platform, the site now communicates more directly and efficiently with the rest of the Guitar Center enterprise.
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, performing in-depth research on what current and future Guitar Center customers are looking for when browsing the Web site. Additionally, the teams researched more than 40 “best-practice” Web sites to develop an optimized user interface regardless of browser or platform.
For the customer, the new site offers the following features: personalization of the customer’s experience, improved navigation to browse store inventory, search enhancements (for instance, the ability to shop products by store radius), a product page redesign (larger images, clean layout, clear pricing and integrated video content), Services pages with enhanced content, a centralized Customer Service Center and the ability to let customers transact with GC in the manner that best suits their needs.
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 significant 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 much more.