Case Study: English Postbox e-commerce site and back office integration
English Postbox is a new venture by one of our current clients - MDT Classics, selling quality gifts on line. They were looking to use their current knowledge of online selling and current back office processes to make this new venture successful.
Having created the design of the website in-house, English Postbox briefed us to create the site, backend database, and integrate the system with the PROTX payment system to take immediate online payment for the goods. This information would be downloaded into their back office system which had been modified to handle the new data.
Key Features
Shopping Functionality
The site includes all the features you'd expect within an e-commerce site, as well as many others, including:
- Search tool for shoppers to easily search for products by keyword or product codes
- Ability to browse products by categories. The backend database was built to allow for a single product to belong to several different categories.
- Product details pages with images, stock information, price and product descriptions.
- Account section where users can view order history, edit their profile etc.
- Ability to add/remove items into a shopping basket, with a summary of the contents always visible on the right-hand side of the screen.
- As the site sells gifts, the user can specify if they want the ordered products gift wrapped, and specify gift messages.
- Calculation of shipping costs based on weight and delivery location.
- Ability for user to enter voucher codes at checkout to apply special discounts etc.
- "Send page to friend" feature where the system will send an email with a link to the current page, as well as the ability to create a wish list.
Product Image Viewer
The client wanted to ensure the user could view various images of a product in a quick and easy way. A standard image viewer was developed. This displays a row of thumbnails for the different views available. Clicking on a thumbnail then loads up the image in the picture viewer above. The user can then click on the image to then show a hi-resolution version in a flexible popup window. This was built to be 100% flexible so the client can easily upload new images and these are automatically added as additional view options.
Payment System And Security
For any e-commerce, secure payment and storage of data is very important to ensure consumer confidence in the site. To enable online payment, the PROTX payments system was integrated into the site. The payment system also implements 3D secure, which is verified by Visa and Mastercard Securecode. A Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) was implemented on key pages to encrypt data transfer between client and server, and key information, such as passwords, is encrypted in the backend database as an extra layer of security.
Integration with Back Office System
MDT already have an existing back office system, which Hero has developed for them, which manages all the aspects of their business. A key part of the brief for this project was to ensure all orders taken through the English Postbox website could be managed and tracked in their back office system in the normal way. So there needed to be a way to easily exchange data between the two.
Hero developed procedures to automatically connect to the online database and copy down, or upload, data between the two. By simply pressing a single button, data changes are automatically syncronised. This process includes uploading new products, product categories and suppliers, updating order statuses and stock information, and downloading new orders and customer information.
Benefits Gained
- A site which can be easily maintained (e.g. available products, stock levels etc.) by the client themselves through their back office system.
- A secure and user friendly site to ensure consumer confidence and ensure the shopping experience is a pleasurable one.
More Information
If you would like to learn more about this project, or discuss how we could do something similar for your organisation, please phone us on 0845 6120620. If you would like to view the site for yourself, click on www.englishpostbox.com
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