Golfwear e-shop

Business challenge

The client was the golf professional's choice for polos, knits, pants, windbreakers, and other accessories. They started in 1998 and their innovative designs had extraordinarily accomplished to combine both utility and sophistications. Within a few years of its American debut in specialty golf stores, due to the large market demand, the client decided to expand its sales scope to the Internet. They were presented with the task to develop a highly professional e-commerce website under extremely aggressive schedule.

Solution

The e-commerce Internet application was developed using Microsoft Site Server Commerce Edition 3.0. The site allowed end users to browse the season's collections, search the products and place orders paying online by credit card. Final order price included shipping fee that was based on the delivery service selection, tax fee that was calculated following US tax policy for the clothing and luxury goods. The system offered the users most advanced features of an e-shop, including ability to see order history, track orders on the way, submit the return and get the money back to the credit card, or initiate order exchange procedure. The administrative side of the site was up to the high standards as well. The system supported flexible price management including all possible types of promotions, coupons, holiday and personal discounts, and wholesale pricing. The website's database was synchronized with the legacy warehouse and accounting applications via daily importing of inventory data and exporting of orders/returns. In addition to the shopping functionality, the website provided the information related to the golf tournaments, players, special fashion shows, and other golf related topics. The content of all those sections was easily managed through the web interface and did not require HTML knowledge and other technical skills of the support staff.

Software and servers: ASP/VB, MS SQL Server 7.0, MS IIS 5.0, MS Site Server Commerce Edition 3.0, Verisign Payflow Pro.

Benefits

Using MS Site Server Commerce Edition 3.0 as a base of the application allowed to minimize the development efforts required to implement the project and to reduce the duration of development phase. The integration with existing warehouse and accounting applications was easy and significantly saved costs of the overall solution. The Site Server offers a set of easily customizable components that provide a powerful engine for an advanced e-commerce application, with much more capabilities than usual e-shop needs. That allows the e-shop to grow, adding more sophisticated features at low cost. Because most of the standard e-commerce functions are provided by Site Server, the development team can concentrate their efforts on the aspects of the website that usually get little attention, and produce very custom and powerful e-commerce applications that are cost effective both in development and support.