Trans World Entertainment Corporation

The Client

Trans World Entertainment Corporation (Nasdaq: TWMC) is one of the largest specialty music and video retailers in the United States. Founded in 1972, the company currently operates nearly one thousand stores in 44 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Trans World operates a retail web site at www.fye.com. Stores are divided into two categories: mall-based and freestanding. Trans World's national mall-based portfolio is now united under the brand name FYE (For Your Entertainment); the portfolio also includes select Saturday Matinee movie stores. Freestanding stores include Coconuts Music & Movies, Strawberries, Spec's, and Planet Music.

The Business Challenge

The business users at Trans World were frustrated by not being able to drive marketing campaigns consisting of promotions, coupons, and targeted communications. To manage sweepstake-style promotions, the site was affiliated with DoubleClick. DoubleClick charged Trans World for every sweepstake entry and did not provide the organization with the ability to gather customer data during the sweepstake entry process. The site lost sales and customers due to huge page sizes and non-optimized code being rendered. About 20% of the product images on the site were not available or were incorrectly displayed. In short, there was a host of issues with the site hampering growth and impeding Trans World's marketing initiatives. McFadyen Solutions was challenged to transition the development and maintenance of the site (www.fye.com) to leverage the maximum benefits of the ATG Dynamo Commerce and Personalization platform.

The Return on Investment

Within a month, McFadyen was able to stabilize several critical technical problems allowing the business users greater flexibility over site operations. Sweepstakes functionality was developed as a module within the ATG platform so that there is one single customer database instead of relying on a third-party (DoubleClick) to collect the data while charging for it. Trans World saves $250,000 a year using the sweepstakes functionality built by McFadyen in place of their former, contracted solution. In addition to increased sales, Trans World now has access to customer data through the sweepstakes registration process. Trans World has experienced increased sales through the implementation of personalized marketing campaigns, which provide visitors incentives such as free shipping, discounts, and coupons. Page load time has decreased, contributing to greater customer satisfaction and fewer frustrated calls to Trans World Customer Service Representatives regarding missing images and products. In addition, Trans World has also placed Kiosks for customer use in inside of mall stores, which are integrated with the www.fye.com web site using secure links for pricing updates and order placement. The Kiosks enable customers to listen to preview products such as music and browse the vast inventory by well-organized product catalog.

The Technology

The site is running on the ATG 5.1.1 Suite with an Oracle database. Verity is integrated with ATG for Catalog Search functionality. Several EDI and database reporting feeds are run as scheduled jobs to make this very complex site function. Interwoven 5.1 is used for content management and cover art deployment. Content team can also create sweepstakes and deploy them as integrated Dynamo pages. The McFadyen development team leverages the Rational Suite of products for issue and source code management allowing successful rollouts of enhancements, bugs and multiple concurrent projects.