clients / case studies / businesses
Gaiam
Goal
To find a technology partner to re-create a company-wide web structure
Solution
Ephibian delivered a consistent and affordable management solution that effectively maintained the 20 websites that drove their enterprise
Results
Introduction
GAIAM is a health-conscious, environmentally responsible lifestyle media company whose goal is to bring ‘The Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability’ into the mainstream. GAIAM has over $200M in annual revenues.One of GAIAM’s goals was to find a technology partner that could provide a reliable advanced platform capable of meeting the demands of enterprise solutions. Also, they wished to move away from their previous web structure that consisted of an ‘Application Service Provider’ model that required that they shared per-sale transactional revenue from their DRTV offerings that was costing millions of dollars in transaction based fees.
GAIAM decided that Ephibian were best positioned to partner with them to achieve these goals. Over a period of a few years, Ephibian supported and developed for a number of GAIAM owned sites, spending approximately three months to implement the first Phase of each.
What did we do?
- Developed 20 GAIAM-owned websites
- Designed and built an enterprise ecommerce system including public site functions, club membership, chat and message boards and customer service functionality
- Incorporated new internet business initiatives within the sites
- Architected the data design
- Retained existing website content
- Ensured compatibility with third party systems, such as a membership bulletin board module
- Built an online community to allow members to fully engage and interact with one another online
- Redeveloped entire individual business units for maximum online success, including Good Times Media, that includes design, development, manufacturing, marketing and distribution of the Billy Blanks fitness franchise via the internet, and Spiritual Cinema, specializing in non-Hollywood distributed movies
- Websites included: more functional educational tools, easier access to information throughout the site and between members, newsletter and blogging capabilities, purchasing functionality, administration tools allowing for storing and maintaining all content, real-time purchase and browsing data analytics and third party vendor functionality for the GAIAM team product partners
How did we do it?
- Ephibian built a back-end system consisting of three layers of interaction: (i) The database, containing all of the information in the system, (ii) Application modules used to access the database and provide specific information based on that application’s role and (iii) A set of web applications performing specific tasks based on screen flow, ensuring the minimal number of clicks to navigate to any part of the site.
- The data model was specifically designed and built in order to save time when accessing and managing large content
- Product publishing and “by-date” price setting tools were provided to the site’s administrators to help organize and manage their content ahead of time in accordance with specific dates (Christmas, Easter, the seasons, the beginning of the school year, for example) in order to maximize sales appeal
- Content tagging was provided to administrators to maximize URL and keywords search engine optimization
- The sites also capture where pay-per-click ads are coming from, allowing them to view which of their ad campaigns were generating the most traffic
- Conversion tracking was included to determine whether the pay-per-click ads were converting into purchases
- As we ported content to the Ephibian Framework Technology (“EFT”) platform, this allowed GAIAM to (i) save millions of dollars by eliminating its payment of transaction fees, (ii) consolidate data across multiple sites, and (iii) manage content across multiple sites from a single platform