March 2009

eCommerce Shop

Focus on:

• eCommerce Store
• increase sales
• marketing

Stats

• scope:
• complexity:
• cost:

Business Requirements

The Naturopathix store has already been doing business for 7 years and has built up a very impressive database of customers and satisfied customers, as can be seen on their testimonials page.

Thus the most important requirement by the customer was that, while we were designing the new site with a modern interface, we retain sufficient consistency with the old site so that repeat customers wouldn't be confused, thinking that they had accidentally landed on a different site. This is an interesting constraint as it means we had to build things quite differently from how we would do normally.

What we did

The new store was built on Virtuemart for Joomla. The Virtuemart extension provides an extremely powerful yet easy-to-use online sales platform that is fully integrated into Joomla. Joomla of course is our platform of choice for deploying websites due to it's amazing flexibility, robustness and simplicity of use.

Joomla provides a template system that totally segregates the presentation and content of a website, even when using fully functional extensions such as Virtuemart. This allows us to separate out our work and easily focus our efforts on the presentation and layout of the new site so that if remained sufficiently consistent with the previous site that repeat customers would not feel lost.

Outcome

The entire project was completed on-time over the span of a couple months, from initial requirements to final acceptance testing and handover. As the site was replacing an existing eCommerce store that was doing business it was important that the handover and switch go as fast and smoothly as possible. We managed the transition to the new website with less than 5 minutes downtime and we had the new site running smoothly within 12 hours (one of the payment gateways stopped working on the new host which took us a while to fix).

The new site retains a consistent look and feel to the old site but built on far more modern technologies that give it a much more modern feel when you start using the site. Interactive elements, menu structures and AJAX updating of shopping cart contents and such provide their customers with a far more familiar and thus reassuring shopping experience.