As the go-to provider of online shopping to the music and entertainment industry, Backstreet Merch needed a reliable pool of talented developers they can trust to maintain and build upon their extensive online platform.
Challenge
Backstreet Merch is a leading retailer of licensed entertainment merchandise, managing online stores for 200+ bands and artists. They sell everything from t-shirts and hoodies to mugs and remastered vinyl pressings from The Kinks to The Black Eyed Peas.
Backstreet are responsible for creating standalone store pages, to be embedded into third-party websites and their work often requires a high degree of customisation.
With no ‘off the shelf’ solution capable of managing their evolving e-commerce platform, Backstreet have their own front and back end systems in place to manage inventory and fulfillment. But rapid growth combined with high volumes of sales, meant the company were looking for a reliable team to take on their web development.
Having worked their way through a large number of developers in a short space of time, Backstreet wanted a development provider with the stability to manage long term growth of their platform and the skills to continue developing functionality and customisation.
Solution
Evolved embedded our first developer into the Backstreet team in mid-2017, to work on the integration of Apple Pay. Since then we’ve added more talent from our bench on an as-needed basis.
The company’s e-commerce platform is based on Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS), MS SQL Server, and programmed in C# on .Net. IIS is the system that sends pages to the user (Web Server). MS SQL Server is where all the data is stored. C# is the programming language used to create the pages and .Net is, in this case, the web application framework used to facilitate development.
Put simply, this is the kind of Microsoft web stack our developers love to work on.
Impact
Over the last two years Evolved Teams developers have worked through Backstreet’s entire inventory of more than 200 online stores replacing outdated systems, with an new updated custom built e-commerce platform. Store revenue and visitors are now at record levels.
A team of between 3 and 5 Evolved Teams developers remain embedded within the Backstreet workforce liaising with management in regular stand-ups, adding new and improved features as requested and rolling out new stores to the company’s clients.
Future
Backstreet Merch was already one of the leading managed e-commerce solutions to the music and entertainment industry.
With our help they continue to set new standards in online retail, providing an easy to manage system for artists to sell their merchandise and a seamless shopping experience for fans.