Rovio - Angry Birds Webshop

The problem is well-known: hungry green pigs have stolen the eggs of a flock of brightly-coloured birds. To get the eggs back, they catapult themselves at the pigs’ hideout. Less well-known is the fact that the Angry Birds, of the eponymous addictive smart phone app, are also available as a PC game and in a large variety of stuffed animals and accessories. On behalf of Finnish entertainment media company Rovio, AOE media launched the new Angry Birds merchandising webshop in the Amazon cloud using the Magento e-commerce platform. The shop is available worldwide and supports countryspecific currencies.

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Challenge
Rovio Entertainment Ltd. was looking for a flexible shop system that can grow with its needs, because Angry Birds merchandising will only continue to expand. The company decided to go with AOE media, as an international Magento Gold Partner with extensive experience in E-commerce and performance optimization. One of the challenges Rovio put to AOE media was the hosting and handling of quickly growing user volumes. 700 million downloads (as of February 2012) of the app have made Angry Birds an absolute bestseller.

Solution
AOE media moved the hosting to the Amazon cloud. The advantage is that it makes the Rovio webshop scale fully automatically – if usage increases, a new server instance is started in seconds and is ready to accept orders within just a few minutes. Rovio is one of the first Magento Enterprise shops to utilize 100% automated scaling like this. Additional caching of most pages enables the home page or category pages to handle several thousand requests a second.

Special Features

• The new Angry Birds shop by AOE media is linked to four third-party systems: Braintree handles payment, while Shipwire does stocking and shipping. Thanks to the Shipwire implementation, the shop “knows” the stock in each location around the world, as well as the restocking and shipping times. The third system is a digital rights management server which handles the automatic licensing of Angry Birds software orders, which Magento then sends by e-mail. Last but not least is a separate mail service, to ensure the stable distribution of thousands of confirmation e-mails.
• Specials and promotions can be updated in Magento and personalized for different user groups; the system recognizes the output device and shows the appropriate content. During campaign periods Magento generates gift card codes for printing and sale by sales partners.

Result
With the huge success of Angry Birds merchandising Rovio needed a capable technology partner for online sales. AOE media made it possible to meet all requirements for a flexible webshop with flexible hosting and high performance Now nothing can stop the colourful little birds on their quest to achieve world stuffed animal supremacy.

Further Web Links: 

Angry Birds webshop in the New York Times

Read the origninal eBay press release

Link:
http://shop.angrybirds.com