Berkeley Advanced Media Institute

Creating an E-Commerce Website for a University

Berkeley Advanced Media Institute (AMI) is a professional development program specializing in digital media training. As part of University of California, Berkeley, AMI holds online workshops in multimedia and video storytelling, social media, data visualization, podcasting, and much more. Their clients include the New York Times and the BBC, as well as a variety of other media outlets, educators, and private companies. 

The Berkeley AMI team came to us with the need to automate their registration process. Although users could explore courses on the AMI website, when they were ready to register for a course, they were routed to a 3rd-party site. Though this system was fine, it wasn’t great. Using an external site made it difficult for the administrative team to track their customers, and created friction in the user experience. The AMI team wanted to find a solution that would allow users to register without leaving the home website.

WooCommerce Automation

After an initial consultation process, we decided to solve this problem by integrating the Berkeley AMI site with an e-commerce tool called WooCommerce. Now, a visitor to the site can research, register, and pay for their workshop, all without leaving the main site.

This integration also came with perks: by having WooCommerce built into the website, Berkeley AMI was able to utilize the smart sales tactics WooCommerce offers: offering bundles of courses at a discount, buy-one-get-one offers, and more.

NovoEd Integration

To further streamline the user experience, Brick Factory also integrated the Berkeley API site with NovoEd, the platform they use to manage online learning. Previously, the Berkeley team had to collect registration information from the external commerce site, then manually import it into NovoEd. This was far too time consuming, and left room for human error. By integrating NovoEd with WordPress, once a new customer purchased a class, a NovoEd account would automatically be created on their behalf. This made life much easier for the busy Berkeley AMI team.

Superior Data Collection

When Berkeley AMI used a 3rd party e-commerce site, there was no way to collect data insights on course purchases – who was buying the product, and how did they arrive at that decision? Now that the purchase of classes takes place directly on the website, the Berkeley team can collect all sorts of valuable information: how people heard about these courses, how they arrived at the website, and much more. The team could now track who their best customers were, which courses were the most popular, and which geographic locations yielded a high concentration of customers. This functionality yielded a wealth of actionable insights for Berkeley AMI, allowing them to improve their marketing and advertising.