E-Commerce Site Hums for Chamberlainmusic.com

Even before it had an e-commerce website, Chamberlain Music of Haslemere, Surrey was already the largest distributor of Yamaha pianos and sheet music in the UK. The business was started in 1990 as a little shop with some musical instruments and sheet music. It grew steadily and well over the years, but, as John Chamberlain knows, growth is the key to survival. Thus, shortly before the new millennium, he began to seek ways to put his entire business on-line.

This was no simple challenge. After all, how do you make it easy to let visitors find what they want amongst an inventory of more than 250,000 printed musical scores? That was when he contacted the people at McLintock, an e-commerce website company.

“Frankly,” Chamberlain said, “I was just going for the advertising value of being on the web. You know, to seem up to date and with it. But the people at McLintock made me realize it could be very much more and we could actually sell items over the web. They had figured out how to take credit cards in a secure way and have the computer print out orders which we would then fill. It all seemed too good to be true, but we gave it a go.”

Over 70% of Chamberlain Music’s business was mail order, so they were used to sending out thousands of catalogs and fulfilling orders as they came in through traditional channels. But once its new e-commerce website went live, they discovered a whole new type of customer from farther away, such as Eastern Europe, the Far East and South America.

“It started with the sheet music,” Chamberlain said. “McLintock worked with the major music publishers to build a searchable database of all 250,000 items which made us an instant resource for musicians. Many of those publishers did not have computerised records which made the task quite arduous. It is certainly the largest database of sheet music, choral and chamber music available in the region and maybe on the entire World Wide Web; it searches frighteningly fast and people can order right away. Though we are very price competitive, price has not seemed to be an issue; people are just glad to be able to conveniently find and buy the items they need.

“Sheet music led to instrument sales. We just sent a load of violins off to Italy because the buyer found us on the Web. Today, one can buy everything from a £50,000 grand piano to the new Yamaha Silent Violin to one £2 piece of sheet music from the site. In our first year of running the site we saw some £30,000 in orders, and the second year has topped £75,000.  Frankly, I enjoy sitting on my front porch over the weekend watching them arrive. Orders arrive every day.”

“Though e-commerce is not a large part of our business today, we envisage it will be in two years time. McLintock has done a great job with the site. They host it on their secure servers, keep registrations current with the search engines and monitor site traffic. The developers there are efficient (if somewhat impatient!) but they truly know what they are doing. We’ve had unbelievable comments from some serious players like Yamaha who think it’s brilliant.

“Most importantly,” Chamberlain says, “We feel very with it and prepared for the future.”

Chamberlain Music is at www.chamberlainmusic.com.

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