Client Profile
The client is an eCommerce company with more than a million products listed on their online store.
Scope
Create a simple and pleasing shopping experience for a very specific scenario: a small, semi-impulsive purchase of a few individual products by non-techie users. This use-case gave rise to this profile:
- We don’t need a feature-rich store. Instead, we want a well-defined, simple experience that will suit most of our visitors
- We want visitors to find the products they want in as short a time as possible
- We want to keep waiting times to the bare minimum
- We want the simplest checkout process possible
This definition lead to the creation of a single-page collapsed catalog with minimum clutter.
The Situation
- A retail website which consisted of over a million products. Extensive taxonomy elements had to be developed for better user interface and search.
- The presentation layer of the portal was to be rendered in rich UI interface and had to be supported by a robust backend that would seamlessly pass data from the database back the presentation layer.
- Supporting platform for building web services was essential for the business logic to reside in the middle tier.
Engagement
We wanted to have a lightweight, semantic and solid base theme to build upon, and having a good base for a responsive layout was definitely a good thing to have for future mobile adjustments, if needed.
Several e-commerce systems were considered by the client prior to choosing Drupal, both open source and proprietary. However, given the challenging UI/UX, they finally chose Drupal for its limitless capabilities in executing a complex design, and we recommended using the new Drupal Commerce suite, which brings the same flexibility to store management. Together with Sasson, we were able to deliver exactly what the client wanted.
Solution
- Drupal was picked as the middle tier for the proposed solution due to its limitless capabilities in executing a complex design and ability to support fast development.
- Drupal has support for mashups, AJAX support, type ahead, e-commerce, blogs etc.
Outcome
- Essentially the time to market was reduced drastically with a site launch ahead of schedule.
- Capability of easy management by the site administrator.
- Automated downloads and daily automated updates from Commission Junction and Linkshare feeds.
Tools
- Sasson
- Drupal commerce
- Features tools
- Commerce coupon
- Commerce bulk product creation
- Rules management
- Client side validation