Launching the exclusive e-book store of the biggest-selling book series of all time was no mean feat
Launching the exclusive e-book store of the biggest-selling book series of all time was no mean feat
J.K. Rowling’s Pottermore, the exclusive retailer of the Harry Potter e-books and digital audiobooks, needed an e-commerce platform that could stand up to the challenge.
After reviewing the options, Pottermore chose Intershop’s Enfinity E-Commerce platform to power the launch of its exclusive Pottermore Shop.
Meeting the technical requirements
Heralded by the trade publishing press as a new model for digital publishing, Pottermore currently has two main sites. Pottermore is an online experience from JK Rowling, based on the Harry Potter stories, made up of a combination of content, community and interactive experiences. The Pottermore Shop allows readers to purchase the Harry Potter digital audio books and, for the first time, the Harry Potter e-books.
When it came to the e-book store itself, Pottermore faced a number of challenges. Firstly it needed an e-commerce platform that could handle the volume of sales expected for such a popular book series while, at the same time, being a proven package that could be brought to market quickly. It also needed to be adaptable enough to deliver the unique transaction experience that Pottermore was seeking.
With a book series as popular as Harry Potter, alongside the growing global popularity of e-books and e-reading devices, Pottermore knew that its new e-book store would need to handle considerable traffic from day one. In its initial discussions with Pottermore, Intershop was able to prove that its software had the scalability required for the Pottermore Shop.
Speeding time to market
Getting to market quickly, without disruption, was the next challenge. With an urgent need to make the e-books available to sit alongside the Pottermore.com experience, and work with new e-reading device and platform providers, Pottermore had no desire for experimentation. With Pottermore’s stated objective of launching the shop in just 3-4 months, a white-label offering like Intershop’s was a good starting point.
The Pottermore vision was to make the Harry Potter e-books available to people in the easiest way possible, and that meant letting them read their purchases on any device they chose, without the limitations of various digital rights management (DRM) technologies used by different e-book readers or stores. The ‘cartridge system’ within Intershop made it straightforward to develop the plug-ins required to integrate with the different e-book providers, devise an account link and enable the e-books to be pushed to preferred devices.
“That was a key part – probably the most technically uncertain part of the project,” said Julian Thomas, Pottermore chief technology officer. “The way Intershop made this possible and straightforward was one of the key attractions for us.”
Built-in payments functionality
With payments and catalogue management ready out of the box, combined with the proven scalability and white-label capabilities, Intershop’s Enfinity E-Commerce platform was the perfect foundation for the Pottermore Shop. “Enfinity was a really powerful white-label foundation to start building the store from,” commented Thomas. “It was the seed of our solution – a lot of things were there and ready. This allowed us to complete the project and launch the Pottermore Shop in just a few short months.”
Pottermore’s implementation is cloud-based, enabling the shop to access additional resources on the fly to handle large spikes in traffic generated by new language launches, product releases and PR coverage relating to the Pottermore brand.
The multilingual, multicurrency website supported by Intershop includes personalised watermarking of the eBooks and digital audiobooks, and the ability to download onto a wide choice of reading devices and platforms including Sony Reader, Google Play, Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and any e-publishing compatible device.
Meeting unprecedented demand
The resulting website is robust and has been proven to scale to support huge numbers of concurrent users and large order volumes from Harry Potter fans worldwide. The Pottermore Shop, which was launched by a single tweet, sold over $1.5 million (£950,000) worth of Harry Potter e-books in the first few days of launch in English (US & UK) in late March 2012. The site continues to grow rapidly, with French, Italian, German and Spanish versions of the Pottermore Shop now open for business.
Harry Potter is the largest selling book series of all time. Thomas added: “Having sold more than 450 million physical books across the world since 1997, making the Harry Potter series available as e-books for the first time was a highly anticipated retail event.
He continued: “The Pottermore Shop demanded a massively scalable and innovative e-commerce solution for a phenomenal brand, especially given the unique linking to multiple leading e-reading platforms, the personalised watermarking approach and the need for a multilingual and multicurrency store designed to expand beyond digital books. Following an intense project involving Intershop’s professional services team the Pottermore Shop exceeded all expectations selling millions of dollars of Harry Potter e-books through the launch period.”
The Harry Potter books have been translated into more than 70 languages, so Pottermore expects to develop its offering to many more book languages and site languages. Pottermore has already announced it is opening the Pottermore Shop in Japan in summer 2012, with the shop site language in Japanese, the eBooks using the emerging ePub3 standard to support vertical text, as well as the Yen currency and local payment options.
“The Intershop solution has proved to be the right choice for Pottermore, and we are confident that we have a platform that can meet our e-commerce ambitions in the future, ” concluded Thomas.
