How Music Direct Amplified Sales by 43% with BigCommerce Customization

Background

Music Direct has spent over a quarter century serving audiophiles and businesses alike. Known for premium speakers, amplifiers, and vinyl collections, the retailer’s online presence was built on an aging DotNetNuke framework paired with Hotcakes for checkout. As traffic grew and expectations rose, the platform’s rigidity and broken APIs left the team struggling to add new features or maintain uptime.

The Challenge

Site maintenance devoured resources, every new feature risked breaking the upgrade path, and customers often encountered out-of-date inventory messaging. Lacking the extensibility they needed, Music Direct knew it was time for a modern solution that supported both B2C and B2B customers without compromise.

Why BigCommerce?

After evaluating platforms, BigCommerce stood out for its Open SaaS model, rich RESTful APIs, and seamless ERP integration. “We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel, but we needed full control when we did,” explains Steve Shapiro, Director of Ecommerce and IT. In partnership with agency BlueBolt, Music Direct embarked on a six-month replatform journey.

Custom Payment Tokenization

A critical requirement was secure tokenization to reduce stored customer data. Leveraging BigCommerce webhooks and REST calls, the team built an integration where orders trigger an API handshake with their gateway, Authorize.net, to fetch tokens and sync them to their Comprehensive Commerce Suite ERP. This setup bolstered security and streamlined transaction handling.

Enhanced User Experience

To reduce purchase friction, Music Direct developed a dynamic backorder notification. When an item is out of stock but on order from a supplier, the storefront flags it as available with expected timelines, converting potential lost sales into confirmed orders without labeling them as pre-orders.

Leveraging Native Tools

Beyond custom builds, the team tapped into BigCommerce’s built-in features. They set up distinct price lists for retail and wholesale groups, enabling seamless tiered pricing. With ShipperHQ, they introduced conditional free shipping and pickup rules. Upcoming integrations with Klaviyo and Searchspring promise personalized emails and smarter site search.

Results & Impact

• 11.29% decrease in average page load time
• 73% reduction in average server response time
• 43% increase in conversion rate

Since launch, stability issues have vanished and the team redeployed hours once spent firefighting to growth initiatives. With a flexible, developer-friendly architecture and robust vendor support, Music Direct now enjoys a reliable platform that scales.

Looking Ahead

Next on the roadmap is migrating affiliated brands into a unified multi-storefront environment, leveraging AI-driven recommendations and deeper customer loyalty programs—all underpinned by BigCommerce’s stable, API-first approach.