HW Music Mega Store

HW Music Megastore

HW Music Mega Store is the UK's largest independent music retailer specialising in musical instruments, karaoke, sound and lighting.

HW wanted to revamp their existing 5 year old website and take advantage of some new technologies to reach their customers.

HW Music Megastore homepage

HW karaoke discs home page

HW instruments, sound and light


db net solutions developed a fully integrated database driven ecommerce solution incorporating various existing backend databases and technologies.

Some of the key technologies implemented included:

  • Microsoft's powerful ASP.net 2.0 and MS SQL server 2005
  • Google sitemaps for all key areas of the sites
  • Google Base to bulk populate Google's products search
  • Various RSS feeds for latest products
  • WorldPay 3rd party payment processing integration

System structure (click to enlarge) System structure (click to enlarge)

One of the core aspects to the solution is the middleware which is currently built around a Microsoft SQL Server 2000 DTS (Data Transformation Service) package and a Visual Basic Module.

This package uses a series of ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) rules to merge the 3 main data sources including two third party systems and a Karaoke Songs Database (developed by db net solutions) in to one product database. This is then shipped to the live web server for use by the website.

The middleware application also takes responsibility for shipping the local images and mp3 files to the webserver using FTP.


Core application (click to enlarge) Core application (click to enlarge)

The web application itself has a fundimental core responsible for the key features of the site such as user registration, security and product database queries.

This core application can be reused accross multiple wesite which enables rapid development of multiple sites or microsites that share the common HW Audio infrastucture.


If you would like further information on this solution or would like to enquire about your own please contact us.