Online Furniture Store with Rich Customization Options

  • Feature-rich ecommerce web sites powered by a single BI-enabled platform
  • Rich furniture design and customization center
  • Optimized back-office operations
Expertise
Web & Enterprise Portals
eCommerce
Verticals
Retail

Leveraging vast hands-on experience of web and mobile development, Iflexion helps Sleepers in Seattle to improve customer service and skyrocket sales.

Calendar
8
Duration
Months
Gears
12
Efforts
Person-months

Context

Our Customer is Sleepers in Seattle – a succeeding furniture store based in USA. 

Since 1991 the company has been designing and distributing ready-to-assemble furniture and accessories by different channels, including the web. At one point, the Customer realized their current static web site was not enough for efficient sales and approached Iflexion requesting development of an e-commerce web application with online furniture customization feature to replace their legacy static website.

The ultimate goal pursued by our Sleepers in Seattle was to stand out of online competition by ensuring unparalleled shopping experience for the company’s clients in search of a perfectly fitting sofa bed.

For this purpose our team was tasked with supplementing the existing .NET-based e-commerce platform with another dynamic website, the two sites sharing a single database and admin area. A single system back-office stood for a shared products’ stock, order processing system, user base and statistics on sales, which, in turn, was designed to reach out to a wider audience, while facilitating operations of back-office administrators.

Solution

In the course of collaboration, Iflexion team delivered two websites – Sleepersinseattle.com and Savvyhomestore.com – providing versatile opportunities to both end users and system administrators.

End users acquired more personalized, convenient and enjoyable  shopping experience thanks to the following features:

  • Rich Design center. Design Center is the website area enabling clients to customize the selected furniture item and see what their sleeper will look like in any of the available colours and upholsteries. Online sofa customization is implemented by means of 3D image rendering and custom-built libraries. Scripts are run to render 3D MAX sofa images that are subsequently uploaded to the server and retrieved to be “covered” with the color/upholstery selected by the customer
  • Advanced catalogue search. The Quick Search feature enables prompt searching by all products and features, while Furniture Finder allows customers to sort the list of selected items by several criteria at a time (price range/brand/dimensions/product category/etc.).
  • Parallel shopping and shared cart. The custom-built Shared Cart provides an opportunity to shop on the two websites simultaneously, casting selected items into one consolidated order
  • Shopping on the go. The two websites are optimized to be accessed from tablets and mobile devices. Crossdevice testing was carried out to determine what changes need to be introduced to ensure those who use their mobile devices to navigate Sleepersinseattle.com or Savvyhomestore.com shop with the utmost comfort

Administrators are enabled to manage homepage widgets, process and track orders, manage products and customers, launch and track marketing campaigns, generating statistics and reports on the two dynamic websites from a single admin interface through powerful and easy-to-use dashboard.

How It Works

E-mail notifications are sent to administrators upon order submission. Clients receive notifications as soon as an order has been processed. The order processing workflow is represented as follows:

The e-commerce platform is integrated with PayPal and Authorize.net for payment processing. Credit card data security is ensured by means of SSL certification and Secure Checkout processes. No credit card information is stored.

Development Process

Iflexion was engaged in the project as a sole technology partner at all stages of application development.

The Customer provided a detailed requirements list at the project initiation stage, complementing it with new ideas as the website development unfold. Iflexion was proactively managing requirements inconsistency that could compromise system flexibility, while suggesting beneficial alternatives.

Thus, we proposed moving the ASP.NET Web Forms-based solution to MVC 4 framework, as the former was increasingly difficult to scale, when it came to extending the web application with a new store. The system’s grids, controllers and listings were refactored, while the interactive admin panel UI was left unaltered, as requested by the Customer who wanted to preserve the look-and-feel they got used to. In a matter of 8 months, Sleepers in Seattle got a full-featured, easily scalable e-commerce solution.

Results

Once launched, the delivered web sites started bringing tremendous profit and the Customer engaged us for another project. Implementation of the scalable e-commerce platform enabled Sleepers in Seattle to reach out to even wider audiences and increase sales volumes through decreasing the effort spent on administering the two websites and facilitating sofa selection process and drastically improving online shopping experience.

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