Adding a webshop to your site can be a headache, especially if you have a large sales catalog which has to be migrated online. You don’t want your existing site to experience any downtime, and you want customers to find shopping online with you easy and intuitive, while still providing them with the products and information they expect. When Advanced Marine Technologies wanted to consolidate their product catalogs and add a new online store, they came to Gossamer Threads to give them all the functionality they wanted without any hassle or unnecessary change to their workflow. Here’s how we helped AMT make the move into e-commerce smoothly and securely, using Gossamer Links and a custom shopping cart, and implementing a careful and detailed import of AMT’s multiple product catalogs.

Building Webshops to Suit

AMT has a unique history, in that it represents the amalgamation of three existing marine part manufacturers, representing the full price spectrum available to customers. A key issue in building AMT’s webshop would be the creation of a new, consolidated product catalog, while maintaining the information contained in the legacy catalogs. Maintaining these legacy catalogs was of critical importance, as AMT’s customers need to know which products are compatible with each other.

Building a webshop from scratch presents challenges, but also allowed for customization from the ground up, tailored to address AMT’s existing workflow and unique catalog situation. Our Gossamer Links platform with a MySQL database offered the versatility this project needed, but would have to be augmented by a completely new shopping cart to accommodate the specificity of AMT’s data.

The new AMT storefront page.

• The new site was custom-built for an established customer base accustomed to phone ordering, rather than online shopping.
• We created accommodations for the rigorous detail of AMT’s boating parts catalog: weights, schematic files, and compatibility with other parts all had to be incorporated. While new product numbers were created, legacy product numbers were also maintained, ensuring that AMT’s customers had all of the compatibility information they needed to make informed purchases.
• Printer-friendly versions of all product pages were also designed, giving prospective customers all of the information they need on a single sheet.
• We used Paypal Pro for payment integration, giving customers the option to stay on AMT’s site while making payments, rather than being redirected to Paypal’s site.
• Shipping prices are calculated in real-time: data is pulled from FedEx and Canada Post, giving customers a range of shipping options and prices as soon as they enter their address, all on the same page.
• A custom back-end payment administration system was built for AMT’s staff, allowing them to view, search, and update customer orders instantly, informing customers of the progress of their orders and storing all sales records in an easily manageable format.
• During the course of our development, AMT incorporated two more extant parts manufacturers into their umbrella company. The new indexing system we created was able to integrate those manufacturer’s catalogs as well. We gave AMT the infrastructure to expand their business in the future, and add more products to their webshop as the company grows.

An order as it appears in the AMT Order Management Panel. Note the options to update the order’s status and generate invoices.

Importing Two Tables

After analyzing AMT’s existing product database, we determined that storing data within two separate Gossamer Links tables (but one installation) would be the optimal route. With many of AMT’s products being available in different sizes, materials, and colours, we realised that normalizing the data – ie, building one table with the core products, and another with the different variations of those products – would have multiple benefits.

• Shoppers can browse and purchase different styles or sizes of a product without having to view multiple product pages – ten of one product in red and half a dozen in blue can all be added to the cart from the same page.
• Normalizing data makes for less maintenance: rather than having to update thirty different records when a core product description or price is changed (ie, one for each colour or size), modifying the core product’s record in the first table is all that is required.

A sample item on AMT’s webshop. Multiple styles and sizes can be ordered, and extra images and compatibility can be viewed.

Once an order is completed, two e-mails are sent: one to the customer with an auto-generated PDF containing the order number, and one to AMT’s staff containing another PDF. After AMT ships the order, a third e-mail containing a tracking number is automatically sent to the customer.

Importing AMT’s existing product data into this new table structure was a challenge. The product catalog was stored in a single Excel file which contained a wide range of data: this had to be organized into numerous categories and product types before the import could be performed. Custom import code had to be written in order to preserve category and subcategory hierarchies in the new tables. Given the large range of types of products and sub-types of products contained within the file, many table columns had to be accommodated in this code.

Advancing E-Commerce

Implementing an e-commerce platform can seem like an insurmountable task, but GT has the expertise to integrate sales into your website while maintaining your inventory’s diversity and appeal. Interested in moving your business forward? Let’s talk.

Fine Choice Foods is a family-run Vancouver company whose web presence needed a fresh start. Using the flexibility of Gossamer Links as the foundation of their site, Fine Choice was able to liven up their website and make it as tasty as their food.

Designing a Fresh Site

Fine Choice’s website design was a unique endeavour. The company was undergoing a redesign in their product packaging as well, and so GT’s designers had to make sure the two designs were consistent.

The new product packaging design with the new site design.

GT’s designers first developed wireframes which laid out where and how content should be laid out. After approval, the wireframes were sent to the brand masters at Studiothink, who were working on the product packaging design.

Wireframes vs Final Composition.

Studiothink produced a home and product page design, and sent it over to us, which we used to design the rest of the site, sharing the creative workload.

Keeping it Simple With GLinks

Fine Choice knows plenty about making tasty food, but less about maintaining websites. Thankfully, the GLinks installation which powers their site generates pages dynamically, meaning that whenever the company wants to add, remove or modify a product page, all they have to do is modify a simple form in the GLinks admin panel, and their site’s pages are updated.

A Seamless Experience

We helped Fine Choice Foods update their web presence, from concept to launch – taking care of everything. Planning, design, development, hosting and even photography of their products was part of our solution.

They were quite pleased with the results and had this to say:

We had talked with a number of web site developers and Gossamer was the obvious choice. After sitting down with Darius and Jack, we had no doubt that they could deliver the site that we had envisioned. And they did! Very professional in their dealings, but also flexible with our requests. We look forward to working with them on our future projects.

Check out Fine Choice Foods and fulfill your craving for some delicious Chinese delights!

On a personal note, your humble blogger has been a fan of Fine Choice’s food for years before they became a client – there have been plenty of late nights here at GT HQ fueled by their veggie gyozas!

Venetubo is a video sharing site dedicated to Venezuelan news and content. The site has been developed using the Gossamer suite of products (Gossamer Community, Gossamer Forum and Gossamer Links), and is a great example of how extensively and productively these programs, especially GLinks, can be modified to develop nearly any kind of site!

Fine-tuning Gossamer Links

Venetubo’s development team has taken full advantage of the versatility of Gossamer Links’ table system. By adding dozens of custom columns, they’ve fine-tuned their database to allow multiple record types to be stored in it.

All of the relevant data needed to display videos, news items, and store products is contained within one single Gossamer Links installation.

Browsing Venetubo

Modular Functionality

In addition to its table editing features, Venetubo have fully availed themselves of Gossamer Links’ modular plugin system. Venetubo’s developers have installed plugins authored both by Gossamer Threads and our community of user/developers, and have even created a few of their own to suit the site’s needs.

Plugin Power!

Venetubo’s MMEncode plugin, for example, was designed to manage queues of videos uploaded by users as they are encoded into .flv format.

Other Cool Features

With the versatility and power of Gossamer Links behind them, and some inventive modifications, Venetubo have been able to develop a wide range of attractive features for their users:

• An iPhone portal which lets users browse Venetubo on the go using a special template set.
• A ‘track user’ feature which lets users follow the uploads of their favourite fellow Venetubo users.
• Video downloads in multiple formats (PC, Mac, iPod, Blackberry, etc.)

…Safe and Supported!

In addition to utilising a range of Gossamer Threads’ programs, Venetubo turned to us when they realised that they needed to improve their hosting platform. We set them up with a pair of our Gossamer Host dedicated servers, and the results were dramatic.

We were happy with our existing setup at The Planet, but the single point of support where Gossamer is responsible for both the application and the hosting environment was very compelling, and their competitive rates provided even more reason to switch. We were pleasantly surprised by the performance increase of our new setup for both video encoding and mod_perl! We’re very happy with the hosting service provided by Gossamer Threads.
- Jesus Altuve, Venetubo Developer

To find out more about Gossamer Links and how it can give your site the versatility and stability it needs to grow, visit our Gossamer Links page, or check out Gossamer Host.