Retail & Ecommerce · Shopify · 2020
Music Plaza
Music Plaza is a well-known music retailer in Los Angeles with a strong online following, particularly among K-pop fans and collectors. Its e-commerce business depends on making a large and constantly changing catalog easy to browse, shop, and trust.
★★★★★ 4.9 stars · 28 reviews across Clutch, Google & Yelp (opens in new tab)
The challenge
The business needed an online store that could keep up with a fast-moving inventory, high customer demand, and a shopping experience driven by artists, releases, and merchandise categories. The challenge was not just to sell products, but to organize a large storefront in a way that reduced friction and supported repeat purchases.
The solution
Olibro built a Shopify storefront designed around product discovery, catalog clarity, and a better customer journey. We structured the site to make browsing more intuitive, highlight key product types, and support the kind of merchandising an active fan-based retail business depends on. The result is a stronger e-commerce platform built for both usability and growth.
Music Plaza is a Los Angeles-based K-pop and Korean music merchandise retailer — albums, official merch, light sticks, posters — serving a passionate fanbase across the US, online and through in-store pickup. We redesigned the Shopify store and ran it as a partner for two years.
The problem
The existing store was working but aging. Eric Chon brought us in to audit it: speed was uneven, the product templates didn’t flex well across a fast-moving K-pop catalog, and the back-of-house — transactional email, shipping, apps, search — had drifted out of alignment. The catalog was about to grow significantly, and the storefront needed to be ready before the volume hit.
What we delivered
- A full Shopify redesign across five page types. Homepage, collection, product, artist, and M-Point loyalty — desktop and mobile, each one drafted, reviewed, coded, and signed off through a five-month cycle that launched in May 2020. The collection page got a real sidebar filter. The product page got a Reviews tab, a Description tab, and a Related Items section that earned its place.
- Speed and SEO foundations laid down properly. A baseline Ahrefs audit, GA and Search Console wired in correctly, then targeted speed work on the three highest-traffic templates — homepage, collection, and product — with the homepage page-load sequence rebuilt rather than patched.
- Search that holds up at scale. When the catalog grew large enough that a query like “IZ ONE” was returning 336+ results, the default search broke down. We swapped in SMART SEARCH & PRODUCT FILTER (CloudSearch) and tuned it for the K-pop catalog shape.
- Two years on retainer. SPF/DNS fixes for Shopify transactional email, Apple Pay checkout, USPS Media Mail, in-store pickup, Hanteo Chart icons, Bespoke shipping integration, Rewind backup, social media setup and a weekly Facebook + Instagram cadence, store policy updates, and ~170 logged tasks across the “Maintenance & Upkeep” and “V1 Website Updates” lists.
Why it matters
K-pop e-commerce is a high-velocity niche — new releases, pre-orders, sold-out drops, fast-moving fan attention. The store has to keep pace without breaking, and the operator has to be able to trust that whatever comes up — a checkout error, a shipping integration regression, a banner that won’t render — gets handled. Music Plaza now sits at 40,000+ customer reviews. The site held up under the growth.
Shopify · redesign across five page types, speed optimization, SEO setup, two-year maintenance retainer.
Before → after
How the site changed.
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