E-Commerce Solution

Company

One of the Iksanika customers is a gift shop in Long Beach, California. They have a wide choice of gifts for any occasion and also provide gift wrapping and delivery services. The location of the shop is not very favorable for business. It is located on a quite street away from the tourist attractions and the city business center.

Problem

Even providing the high quality service and carrying out a costly advertising campaign the store owners didn’t get the amount of customers they wanted. The reason for that was mainly the store location but it could not be changed at that moment. The company management started thinking about opening an e-shop that would have the same assortment of goods and provide the same services as a physical store.

Solution

The company marketing manager considered Iksanika as one of the potential companies to order an e-commerce website. After short negotiations and portfolio demonstration the company decided to start cooperating with Iksanika.

Business analytics offered a few variants of the solution one of which was approved by the company management. The new website was decided to be created with the help of the newest e-commerce technologies. The Iksanika specialists together with the company management put forward the main requirements to the e-shop:

• The website must not only sell but also provide useful information for buyers.
• The payment system should be flexible so that a customer could pay with any method convenient for them (VISA, MasterCard, and American Express).
• The customer must have an opportunity to see the status of their order: processing, delivery, received etc.
• The stock-taking must be automated. The information about product availability must change according to the orders made online and purchases made at the store.

The conception and navigation of the e-shop were thoroughly thought out. The website administrator part was also developed taking into account sales-assistants and managers ideas and requests. One of their requests was to get an SMS on the sales-assistant on duty cell phone when an order is made on the website. It would let getting immediate information about the order even without a computer at hand. Another useful feature that was integrated into the system is the customer’s profile. On this profile page all the purchases that were made both online and offline were to be recorded to execute the principle: the more the customers bought at the store the better discount they got next time.

Technologies

Below are the technologies that were used by Iksanika developers while creating the system:

• PHP/Templates engine/Iksanika’s trade platforn engine + Sympfony, MySQL Database, HTML/Ajax/CSS/JavaScript, Memcach server + interface for PHP.
• AWS cloud based infrastructure, IBM kasse device

Benefits

Finally, the e-shop was launched. It had a rich and flexible functionality though remaining a classical type of e-shop most of the online customers were used to. The gift shop electronic version received favorable comments from the customers. Most of them appreciated:

• Timely update of general information and products availability data
• Simple form of ordering a gift and user-friendly website navigation
• Reliable payment system and choice of payment methods

The website got popular within the next few months. According to the company statistics since the e-shop had been officially launched and promoted 37% of the site visitors ended up in ordering a gift or wrapping service. Moreover, many users of the electronic gift shop wanted to get a better view of the product and went to the “real” shop. Eventually the popularity of the store grew and so did the company annual profit.