Retail Umbraco Case Study

Challenge

Jacobs the Jewellers needed a new e-commerce website for their business. The requirements were to provide a modern look and feel and a responsive design. The user experience had to be seamless to allow prospective clients to easily purchase their Jewellery online.

Jacobs view their website as an additional shop window that allows their customers to peruse their product range online. Buying Jewellery is a very personal experience, the majority of consumers like to try the products before they purchase. However with the improved website and the right products Jacobs hope to improve their number of online orders.

Jacobs manage their shop inventory using an Electronic Point Of Sale (EPOS) system called Encore. The previous website allowed Jacobs to manually export product information and import this information into the site, Jacobs asked if Vizioz could improve this process to allow the two systems to be more closely integrated without the need for manual steps.

Finally in the old Jacobs website, orders were sent via email and manually entered into the EPOS system to be processed, Jacobs asked if Vizioz could also look to improve this process.

Solution

Vizioz built the new website using the Umbraco Content Management System (CMS), with a neat elegant design more inline with the current image of the business. The new responsive site has been built on top of the popular open source front end framework called the Foundation Framework.

The e-commerce functionality has been implemented using the eCommerce plugin Merchello, it provides a framework to manage the products, shopping basket and checkout workflows.

In order to achieve the integration with the store EPOS system Vizioz created a custom plugin that pushes updated product data to the website at scheduled intervals. Vizioz then creates, updates or deletes products within Merchello, at the same time the product collections and online category pages are updated.

Product orders are now automatically sent from the website to the shop EPOS system using the plugin built by Vizioz.

Benefit

The new website has been very well received by Jacobs the Jewellers and their customers. The integration with the shop EPOS system allows Jacobs to manage their product catalogue with the tools they are used to using without needing to duplicate this work on the website.

Due to Umbraco providing a nice editor user experience, Jacobs have become more confident in adding marketing content to their website. Vizioz built additional templates that have allowed Jacobs to add new sections that add value and improve their customers experience on the website.