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Development of an Ecommerce Trade Website
Technologies Used
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Umbraco 7 + uCommerce
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SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines
.NET Framework
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Azure Function Apps
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API Integrations
Results
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A multi language trade website to showcase and sell to business customers
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Fast loading, modern and secure
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Mobile and tablet friendly
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Fully synchronised with the client's on premise software system
The Partner
The partner is a leading wholesaler and retailer of homeware, gifts, toys, and games that have been designed for every occasion. They’re an established business having started some many decades ago on the streets of London’s Portobello Road. Their beautiful, fun, and quirky products can now be found across the entire globe. They have also been awarded the 2019 Queen’s Award for Enterprise which was given for outstanding continuous growth in overseas sales.
Background
The partner has many thousands of business customers located across the world with a particular focus of customers within the Economic Union. The business required a trade website that was tailor designed and developed to serve the needs of their business customers.
The website required to be focused for a business, it would need to support multiple languages and it would need to be easy for employees to manage transaction for each language with a particular requirement to be able to have control of changing particular words and phrases in other languages which they knew would be better understood by those customers.
It was critical that the website would be integrated and synchronised with their internal systems so that there was real-time communication between the two and so that customers could access their balance, invoices and would be able to modify their orders. These changes would be relayed into Rex London’s warehouse system before the order is processed and picked.
They also required CMS (Content Management System) functionality so that they could change and add web pages themselves to manage content, as well as manage sliders and other assets and images. They also required excellent and easy to use SEO customisation so that they could invite their SEO partner to access the back end to perform changes as and when needed.
Solution
We proposed using Umbraco CMS which out of the box proved many of the requirements. This package, along with a third-party component uCommerce would provide the necessary ecommerce functionality. Umbraco is a flexible and highly customisable option for designers and developers to create bespoke websites, it’s scalable and would easily be able to handle a more complex, enterprise-level site that would offer many thousands of products (SKUs) to their customers. The back end is also equipped with a user-friendly interface, ensuring employees would not become frustrated when using the platform. The intuitive nature would make using the front-end straight forward and easy for employees to navigate and manage their site.
Umbraco is also SEO Friendly and has several built-in features. Some of these features included customisable URLs, support for metadata and structured data markup. Using these in-built features meant less time spent developing, ensuring cost and budget was focused on other requirements. Ensuring the site was safe and secure was also a high priority. Umbraco is a secure CMS that provides robust security features, including role-based access control, and two-factor authentication.
We proposed implementing Bootstrap for the front-end which ensured a uniform experience across desktop and mobile devices. We took advantage of building several API endpoints within the Umbraco API functionality and developed additional API endpoints on their internal business management system to support connectivity for their existing business management system.
The website was hosted in Azure on a Virtual Machine. The website was configured with disaster recovery and replication across multiple data zones and was configured in within a Azure Recovery Services Vault to ensure the best possible data redundancy and security capabilities.
