Berlitz: Selling online courses to modern ecommerce shoppers
Tracey Wallace
Why they won
iMedia was a finalist for the Innovation Award for Agency Innovation for their work on Berlitz.
For API integration across various systems allowing for streamlined UX and back office efficiency when selling online courses.
Business stats
Founder: Maximilian Berlitz
Who submitted (and is quoted below): Brian McGovern, Partner
Year founded: 1878
Headquartered: Princeton, NJ
Ecommerce vertical: Education
Agency used: iMedia
Business outcomes of the innovation
Simplifying employee system usage from 2 to 1 via APIs
Time saved for brand employees sans a hit to the customer experience on the front-end
What they do
Berlitz is a seller of online courses. They use Sitecore as their main CMS and BigCommerce as their shopping cart technology to collect payment and deliver the non-physical assets.
The challenge behind the innovation
Our client, Berlitz is running its CMS on Sitecore. The cart process is handled by BigCommerce.
They needed a way to manage the online course material that they sell online in one place rather than both systems.
We solved this by creating a seamless integration that allows editors to add/edit/update sellable items directly in Sitecore, and have those pushed out to BigCommerce.
Now, the editing experience is all in 1 place for editors. On the customer’s end, the transaction is handled by BigCommerce.
Our integration also passes the styles and appropriate header and footer menus over to BigCommerce so that the checkout process has a unified user experience from landing on the homepage to checkout confirmation.
How they make it work
The various BigCommerce APIs allowed us to take advantage of all the functionality needed to push and pull items as needed.
We were also able to add items to the cart via the API so that the BigCommerce system could pick up with the cart screen and process the checkout.
All of this happens in near real-time so the customer experiences zero delays or lags.
Final word
Our client was able to go to market faster as a result of the BigCommerce APIs, not interrupt the editorial process, and not have to learn to edit content in a new system.
It allowed each system to play its role to make the brand’s editorial experience easier, as well as the end user experience seamless.
We were able to save time and deliver value to the client in this re-design, re-architecture.
Tracey is the Director of Marketing at MarketerHire, the marketplace for fast-growth B2B and DTC brands looking for high-quality, pre-vetted freelance marketing talent. She is also the founder of Doris Sleep and was previously the Head of Marketing at Eterneva, both fast-growth DTC brands marketplaces like MarketerHire aim to help. Before that, she was the Global Editor-in-Chief at BigCommerce, where she launched the company’s first online conference (pre-pandemic, nonetheless!), wrote books on How to Sell on Amazon, and worked closely with both ecommerce entrepreneurs and executives at Fortune 1,000 companies to help them scale strategically and profitably. She is a fifth generation Texan, the granddaughter of a depression-era baby turned WWII fighter jet pilot turned self-made millionaire, and wifed up to the truest of heroes, a pediatric trauma nurse, who keeps any of Tracey’s own complaints about business, marketing, or just a seemingly lousy day in perspective.