Samples of our Work: Page 2

To view a bigger picture of a stock item, the customer clicks on the thumbnail on the left of the screen. Now, when we first made the Glamourous Gowns site, we used a Lightbox at this point, as they were new, fresh and looked good. Since then, every other site on the web seems to use the same lightbox. So we have developed our own one, which supports zooming and thumbnails. It isn't perfect though, and doesn't play well with earlier versions of Internet Explorer. Consequently, we have put in a fallback so that IE 6 users will get the old lightbox.

Once a user clicks on the ADD TO CART button, they will be presented with the shopping cart. There they can fine-tune their order. We also gave them the facility of copying an item in the cart. So if a bride wants to order three identical bridesmaids dresses for her bridesmaids, she only has to select the colour / style etc once. She can then copy the item and adjust the size. This saves customers a lot of time, and is an example of how we can fine-tune procedures to match your business model. You may require real-time stock control, for instance. At Glamourous Gowns, the stock is normally made to order by the designers, so that wasn't an issue. However, we can build systems to match any requirements.

So now our happy bride has clicked CHECKOUT. The first screen the customer gets contains the terms and conditions, which must be agreed to before continuing. As wedding shops tend to sell made-to-order items, the terms and conditions are different from most DSRs. It is important the customer knows this, and that they have got the sizes right. Consequently, we avoided just having a link to the Terms and Conditions. Instead, they are displayed onscreen, in a scrollable box.

Once the terms are agreed to, the payment method is selected. Now, some methods will be generic for any system. Bank Transfer, and Paypal to a lesser extent, can be used by any website. However, if you reading this as a prospective customer of ours, and are looking for a system of taking credit card payments, then be aware that you will need to have an account with a specific payment system in order to take online cc payments. We can get it all organised, you just need to be aware at the moment, that it is not as simple as a Paypal-only system.

The checkout process is fairly painless, and a customer can go back a stage if they need to correct something without losing their information.

And thats that! Once a customer has completed checkout, they are sent an email summary of their order. Your requirements may be different though. You may need to offer more informative tracking information. There is no limit to what can be done, within reason.

So that's how a typical site of ours works. In the final part of the guide, we will show a couple of other features, and also look at the backend system, which allows our customers to maintain the site themselves, should they so desire.