The perfect ensemble: How Cosmo Music transformed its ecommerce business with VTEX

Challenge

Cosmo Music operates with a myriad of business models, including a B2C channel, a B2B2C rental business, and an external marketplace business. Each of these channels has its own order and inventory management, merchandising, catalog, and checkout requirements. Traditionally, Cosmo Music satisfied these needs through extensive customizations on a legacy, single-tenant commerce platform.

One notable complexity of Cosmo Music’s business is its product catalog, thanks to the uniqueness of each instrument the company sells. For instance, each guitar has its own distinctive wood grain, which is as unique as a customer’s own personality. This necessitated a sophisticated cataloging system where each instrument gets registered as a serialized SKU, featuring photos and intimate details of the specific product on product detail pages.

Additionally, Cosmo Music’s logistics requirements were particularly complex, handling varied shipping requirements such as back orders, ship-from-store, and buy online pickup in-store (BOPIS). This includes items they cannot ship, like acoustic pianos and double-basses.

Solution

VTEX’s SaaS digital commerce platform is acting as a one-stop solution that addresses all of Cosmo Music’s business and technology requirements in a single natively-integrated platform. With VTEX’s composable and complete architecture, Cosmo has the ability to introduce and test new third-party applications to find which technologies result in the most profitable architecture for their business. 

To solve the catalog complexities, VTEX enabled Cosmo Music to create collections of SKUs and dedicated web pages for each. The platform’s flexibility enabled them to present those serialized SKUs and list new unique products as they are sold.

To accommodate the logistical complexities, VTEX’s distributed order management system, incorporating inventory management capabilities, has streamlined these processes, bringing them all into the VTEX platform without any custom code. The transition helped to significantly improve operational efficiency and accuracy, contributing to an enhanced customer experience.

Despite the extensive requirements and complex operations, the implementation of the VTEX platform took just seven months, carried out by the system integrator Syatt. Syatt brought a team that supported the implementation alongside VTEX and stood out by deeply understanding the business needs. VTEX and Syatt were all hands on deck in the weeks leading up to the go-live, with both VTEX’s solution architect and field software engineering teams supporting the final stages of the transition.

As an AWS Partner, VTEX builds digital commerce solutions that provide efficient and customizable solutions. The VTEX solution utilizes technologies such as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service and AWS Elastic Beanstalk for cloud-based applications and API servers management, Amazon CloudFront, to deliver content near to where shoppers are, and Amazon RedShift based machine learning systems to assist our partner merchants with improving their shopping experiences.

Results

Following the VTEX implementation, Cosmo Music experienced steady organic traffic, a notable boost in mobile traffic, and a more than 50% increase in conversion rates over the old site. This was an essential KPI for Cosmo, which had experienced challenges with a previous migration that resulted in a drop in traffic. To prevent this, the Cosmo, VTEX, and Syatt teams completed many activities—like URL mapping and good SEO strategies—to ensure site stability and smooth organic traffic after the new site went live.

This was especially important since the new website went live less than a month before Cosmo Music’s biggest annual event, CosmoFEST. The event is a live music festival the company holds at its retail location in Richmond Hill. Because the site was up and running for the event, Cosmo was able to handle peak traffic during the event, including taking more orders and hosting a lot of content for the event. In addition to frontend improvements, was also a major improvement on the Admin side, enabling Cosmo employees to be more efficient.

We identified early on in our discovery process that VTEX would be a front-runner in our search for a new ecommerce platform, in particular, due to its endless scalability with large SKU and transaction count possibilities. The VTEX team has been excellent to deal with, and the platform has exceeded expectations. We’re excited to continue our journey with VTEX by continuing to leverage their cutting-edge technology.

Mark Hebert, president and CEO, Cosmo Music

*DISCLAIMER: All information and numbers seen in the above text were provided and approved by Cosmo Music (VTEX's customer).