70% Sales Boost with Crystallize As Subscription Management Solution
NextJS on the front + Crystallize on the back for content management and subscription management for new blazing-fast BUNAD Magasinet website.
3 minutes
The national costume, or Bunad, is among the most traditional things in Norway (besides ‘brown cheese’ Brunost, of course). A couple of years back, BUNAD Magasinet, a magazine dedicated to taking care of Norwegian heritage, reinvented its business strategy with a focus on digital subscriptions. Recently they moved completely to a modern tech stack.
The old website was a custom PHP website that was not responsive, had poor website performance and speed results, suffered from code bloat, and the content possibilities were limited. Their webshop was an ordering engine that depended on a web form!?
Old habits die hard, so the biggest challenge was introducing modern development and its benefits to the BUNAD Magasinet team.
Snowball, one of our web dev partner agencies, introduced them first to a modern-ish tech stack with Crystallize as a subscription commerce engine and eZ Platform for a paywall-restricted version of their magazine content.
While the combo worked as intended, they wanted to simplify their workflow additionally and move to headless architecture completely to future-proof their website. The perfect solution for them ended up being Next JS on the front end and Crystallize on the back end.
As a result of the change, sales rose by 70% while subscribers now had complete access to material archives going back to 2004.
Let’s break down the roles that these two play in this project.
Nowadays, it is not enough to have a product page and start selling. Especially for traditional things like the offering of the BUNAD website. To get the younger generations on board with tradition, a story has to be told. A story that is compelling and meaningful. A story of tradition and heritage, one that offers a sense of comfort and belonging.
For most businesses, that would mean relying on a separate solution for storytelling, a CMS if you like, separated from the eCommerce and subscription part of the website. That is for businesses not relying on Crystallize.
Previously the content management software eZ Platform was used to publish a digital version of their magazine content. A full archive of hundreds of articles and thousands of images available for readers to instantly consume, dating back to 2004. With so much content, a change would not be easy.
There is currently no product like Crystallize on the market. One that ties together the capability of headless eCommerce, PIM, and CMS and gives you absolutely everything you could possibly need to sell your product. The team at BUNAD used this to deliver stories beyond simple product pages for their vast archive.
Magasinet Bunad sells subscriptions using Crystallize. In the previous setting to automatically grant access to protected material, Crystallize's webhooks were employed. By simply connecting the webhooks to the eZ Platform API, developers could easily automate the access and entitlement process.
Today it is all wrapped and edited from a single source ie the Crystallize platform making so much easier for them to track and manage subscriptions.
Account creation and single sign-on for Magasinet Bunad are accomplished utilizing the Facebook login API together with Klarna payment. This makes it possible for two-click registration and payment, which results in a frictionless user experience.
The decision to use Next.js was made by the BUNAD team because it is a fantastic React meta-framework with a simple API surface that enables you to create both dynamic server-rendered and static pages. This allowed them great performance.
The business saw a whole 70% rise in top-line revenue as a result of the new tech stack and the simplification of the eCommerce process. Additionally, the stack equips BUNAD Magasinet with a content and commerce architecture that is future-proof and enables them to embrace storytelling as a component of their selling process fully.
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