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ATG Helps Top Online Retailer in Netherlands to Attain Growth Objectives
Thursday 19. February 2009 - In Choosing ATG Commerce, bol.com Equips Itself with An e-Commerce Platform that will Improve Performance and Allow the Rapid Integration of New Applications
ATG (Art Technology Group, Inc., NASDAQ: ARTG), the premier provider of e-commerce solutions, today announced that bol.com, the leading online retailer in the Netherlands, has deployed ATG Commerce, ATG Content Administration and ATG Merchandising. The move to a new platform was necessitated by the desire to simplify the administration and commercial management of its site, and to increase the number of visits and ease of browsing for users.
Created in 1999, bol.com is the most popular site for leisure products (books, games, music, DVD, mass-market electronics) in the Netherlands. More than 11 million products were sold online last year on bol.com with a record of 80,000 in only one day, in December, 2008. This sale record was achieved thanks to the latest version of the bol.com website, based on ATG technology.
In 2006, bol.com decided to overhaul their e-commerce platform to support the economic growth of the company and to appreciably improve the performance and management of the site. Having carried out a detailed analysis of the solutions available on the market that were able to meet the specific demands of a retail site of bol.com’s size, the company chose ATG Commerce (with ATG Content Administration and ATG Merchandising as key components) in July 2007. This suite of solutions was chosen on account of its interoperability, its flexibility, and its ability to integrate new applications both rapidly and effectively.
Following various tests, the solutions were implemented with the help of Spindrift, a local partner. “One of the fundamental criteria that governed our choice, besides the practical resources of the products, was the minimising of any risk during the integration,” declared Willem van Groenland, CIO of bol.com. “Forty of our developers were involved in the project in order to build knowledge and ensure a smooth transition without any loss of data.”
“The migration to the new platform was a complete success,” said van Groenland. “No customers were affected by the changes we went through. There was no downtime during the process, and no data loss. Our customers immediately appreciated the new features, and thanks to the new url-structure of our website, our ranking in the major search engines such as Google was better than ever,” he added.
Along with the improvement of the general performance of the site (speed, security, reliability, ease of navigation), ATG’s Business Control Center provides business users with an extensive set of tools to manage customers, products, and promotions through a single interface.
“The chance for our sales teams to put intelligent sales scenarios into practice, to change prices, to insert logos, and perform many other business functions offers a genuine added value in terms of efficiency,” continued Willem van Groenland.
Today, with ATG Commerce, ATG Content Administration and ATG Merchandising, bol.com possesses a suite of tools able to optimize the company’s performance at all levels. Other ATG solutions, such as ATG Outreach and ATG Campaign Optimizer are also being evaluated by bol.com to extend the power and reach of the bol.com site.
“We are entirely satisfied with the way in which this project has proceeded. We have particularly valued the skills of the ATG teams in terms of support and their constant desire to improve their products and solutions. ATG allows us to have a system that is perfectly adapted to the demands of our extremely busy e-commerce site. Furthermore, their solutions offer the scalability necessary to meet our explosive growth and flexibility to meet our continuously increasing functional requirements,” concluded Willem van Groenland.