Swissflowers

E-Commerce and Online store Management

Overview

Swissflowers is an existing web shop developed using ColdFusion, a commercial rapid application development platform, easily designed to connect HTML scripts to any database. It comes along with its own IDE and a scripting language.

Technology  :  OsCommerce
Application Type  : Web Shop
Application Scale  : Medium

Project objective

Due to certain reasons , SwissFlowers had to be migrated to Oscommerce, an ecommerce and online-store management software program. New features had to be implemented to this shop after migration.
Two development resources were allotted to this project.

Why Oscommerce……

Oscommerce could be used with any web server having PHP and MySQL installed. It is available as free software under GNU General Public License.

Oscommerce provides a basic set of functionalities that meets the common needs of online businesses. In addition, it can be customized to meet specific business needs.

Features

• Compatible with all major browsers.
• Multi-lingual English, German and Spanish by default.
• Support for dynamic images (one image per product).
• Supports physical products as well as product downloads.
• Database backup and restore.
• Temporary and permanent shopping carts.

Key Challenge

The existing system, in terms of workflows and business models, was completely different from a conventional Oscommerce application. Thus, synchronizing it to Oscommerce was a major challenge.

Also, new features excluded in a normal Oscommerce application had to be implemented namely:

• Automatic generation of different discount coupons.
• Email exportation
• Tool margin
• Webmile Management
• Winbiz Integration
• Yoodle Affiliation
• Barcode generation
• Calendar Management
• Producer Cockpit Concept. (A producer enters product and it gets published following admin’s approval.)
  Thus, an entire Oscommerce solution had to be customized to bring in the above functionalities.

Solution

The PITS resources had to perform a detailed study on the Oscommerce solution especially in terms of workflows and business models. Prior to including additional features, they had to migrate the existing system completely to Oscommerce. However, with great effort and dedication, we were able to implement all the above requirements, thereby resulting in an effective web shop.

 

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