Client Profile
-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.
Client Objectives
- 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 leads to the creation of a single page collapsed catalog with minimum clutter.
Project Challenges
- 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
Solution
- 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.
- WordPress has support for mashups, AJAX support, type ahead, e-commerce, blogs etc.
Conclusion
- 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.
Highlights
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
- Sasson
- WordPress Commerce
- Features Tools
- Commerce Coupon
- Commerce Bulk Product Creation
- Rules
- Clientside Validation
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
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 WordPress, both open source and proprietary. However, given the challenging UI/UX, they finally chose WordPress for its limitless capabilities in executing a complex design, and we recommended using the new WordPress Commerce suite, which brings the same flexibility to store management. Together with Sasson, we were able to deliver exactly what the client wanted.
