Mark Bold

Permajet

Permajet is a major photographic equipment and printing supplies retailer. They needed to begin to move their stock online, and this itself was a massive undertaking, simply adding their enormous catalogue to an ecommerce engine. Added to this, the ecommerce front end was required to synchronise both products and customer activity with their legacy internal fulfillment systems.

The ecommerce engine was developed from scratch using Object Oriented PHP code and MySQL. This product management application was required to run as many sites as necessary from the same web server and database, and it was required that sessions should persist across any number of domains to allow customers to add to their carts from any site and check out on just one.

The site utilised automated SOAP interaction with the company’s internal systems to ensure sychronisation, and the back end interface was enhanced with AJAX to allow real-time updates to product information that may also have been updated elsewhere.

permajet.com

Identity Jewellery

Identity Jewellery required an ecommerce website on which to promote and sell their wide range of handmade jewellery and gifts.

They needed a comfortable boutique feel to the site, while allowing the imagery of their product catalogue to speak for itself. Special attention was given to image handling and uploading facilities in the product administration interface.

The owners wished to make the site a core part of their business, but were inexperienced in setting up and selling online, so a simple but extensible ecommerce framework was used to power the site. This allowed the content editors to first just display products, but later add in options later such as stock control, engraving and gift wrapping.

www.identityonline.biz

Timberline

Timberline is a very successful retailer of wooden and garden furniture and play equipment. They needed to make the move to selling online, even though their product range can seldom be bought off the shelf, needing instead to be configured and often made to measure.

Their existing static website was replaced with an ecommerce engine, allowing the content owners to maintain and update the main product database and accessory components. This move was augmented by a search engine optimisation company, who reworked the content of the site to enhance keyword density and organic search rankings.

A main concern of the owners was the quality of information drawn from leads generated on the site, so a range of measures, such as automated postcode look-ups, were implemented to ensure the integrity of user data.

www.timberline.co.uk

Dedicated server wizard

With an emphasis on high-end dedicated hosting sales, Verio wished to allow potential clients to explore the flexibility and broad range of its services with an online configuration tool. The web team at Verio US were working on such a tool, so European developers took an active role in negotiating a version for use across the Atlantic.

A decision was made to release the code the US had been working on to Europe. Firstly, this required some amendments to integrate it into the design and branding of the European web sites.

Once the product range was consolidated, QA and testing then began on the online tool by both product managers and members of the sales team. The launch in Europe was timed to follow the launch of the online tool in the US, and proved popular with visitors, resulting in a significant number of sales leads.

domainsaver.co.uk

With the success of the AOL microsite campaign, NTT/Verio decided that the effective shopping cart design should be more fully implemented in the SME sales channel. The design would be adopted by all Verio’s European offices, and also stripped down to a white label product to be used by major resellers.

The first stage of development was to modify the existing AOL microsite design and separate the process from the branding, to allow full modification of the site. The backend programming was then shared with developers in Germany, who would oversee implementation of the design in European offices.

A flexible, pan-European design was then applied to the white label product to create a microsite with an appearance and branding distinct from Verio’s main web site. Further development work concentrated on client upsell, where product information and domain name recommendations would be given to returning visitors to the site. The goal was to clarify the means of buying a domain name and building a web site.