Automating the cross-sell at LegendaryHeroes.com

Offering DVDs and merchandise for Lord of the Rings, Xena Warrior Princess and other titles on different sections of its web site, LegendaryHeroes.com once had to rely on telemarketers to cross-sell. Now a new e-commerce platform brings them all together and allows automated cross-selling. “Now we can offer customers the same product combinations on the web as we do through our call center,” Leslie Raymond, director of Internet services for parent company Davis Anderson Merchandising Corp., tells InternetRetailer.com.

Davis Anderson initially built LegendaryHeroes.com as an umbrella site that linked shoppers to separate sites for several titles licensed from Universal Studios, New Line and other production companies, titles including Conan and Hercules as well as Xena Warrior Princess and Lord of the Rings. An outside web developer coded each site individually with its own separate shopping cart, making it impossible to cross-sell merchandise from a single web page, Raymond says.

The site couldn’t compete with telemarketers, who could arrange to ship products related to different movies, she says. “Many times someone who wants a Xena sword will also want a sword from Lord of the Rings and a Conan T-shirt,” she says.

Last fall, Raymond brought in the NetSuite platform from NetSuite Inc., a company that specializes in providing integrated e-commerce platforms to small and mid-size retailers. Since then, LegendaryHeroes.com has been able to increase sales through automated cross-selling among its different entertainment titles, which now share a single shopping cart. In addition, NetSuite provides a more stable and usable e-commerce platform that is able to handle sudden spikes in traffic and respond with e-mail marketing based on changing customer demand.

When Lord of the Rings won several Oscars earlier this year, for example, LegendaryHeroes was able to avoid past problems with traffic spikes related to publicity about its entertainment titles. To get by spikes in the past, it had to pay extra to run duplicate sites on multiple servers.

It also uses NetSuite to monitor traffic for particular items. When it noticed an uptick in sales of Lord of the Rings action figures following the Oscars, it was able to quickly send out an e-mail promotional campaign in an effort to sell out its stock of action figures while demand was hot, Raymond says. “We sold almost every Lord of the Rings action figure out of our warehouse,” she says.