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Case study forwww.TipareDeCroitorie.ro

Development methodology | page

Case study | www.TipareDeCroitorie.ro

Overview

FYB Romania has been selected to develop www.TipareDeCroitorie.ro, a standard in Roma-nian eCommenrce services for sewing patterns. .

Challenge

The main goal of the client was to be able to sell niche products online to clients used mainly to offline purchasing. The most important prob-lems our team had identified were:

low eCommerce market in .ro

Clients used with offline purchasing

The marketing team of the client had to carry the burden of defining the needs of such a proj-ect, but we’ve had to select the best technical method to ensure the success of their concept.

Approach

After a preliminary discussion between us and the account manager designed by the client to work for the online part of the project, both par-ties agreed on the process to follow. Our project workflow has been considered well implement-ed and feasible for “Tipare”, as the company had previous experience in developing similar projects and was familiar with the industry stan-dards.

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Screenshots | www.TipareDeCroitorie.ro

Home page

Quick look at the most important products on sale,

discounts, special offers and so on

Products details

See all of the products details and options to order

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Products pageProducts listings, easy to find by name, code and

easy browsing.

Shopping cartQuick order process, easy online payment

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Understanding

Development methodology | page

Understanding

NDA

As always FYB Romania has considered to be most important to have a strong base for building up trust between us and our clients. A preliminary collaboration contract and NDA (Non Disclosure Agreement) have been signed between parties.

Primary details

In this case, the client had quite a clear understanding of what is required from the project and had prepared a functional description that covered most areas of the system.

Service identification

A market research and several client discussions have helped our team to identify the services struc-ture based on the following key issues:

• The application has different areas, depending on who will be using them. The visitors are the most important ones as they need to be converted to customers. Visitors need to focus on two sec-tions of the website: concept pages that describe the prouducts use in general and the online shop to convert the visitors into customers.

• By creating an order, the visitor becomes a customer and several new options need to be available to him. Customer care is very important as it’s always a chance for them to come back or refer someone else to the service.

• The second types of users are the website administrators. From this point of view, there are also two different parts of pages that need to be updated: the text pages and the shop. The text pages need to be very flexible both in terms of layout and content, while the shop needs to be very easy to update by adding, editing products, viewing orders and tracking their statuses, only to mention some of the requirements.

NDA Primarydetails

Serviceidentifications

Technicalstrategy

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Understanding

Technical Strategy

Several aspects have been taken under consideration at this phase, such as a limited budget, a limited time and some very specific needs specified by the client. By analyzing several solutions, the framework of XCart has been chosen for customization, xCart being an authority when it comes to online shops with easy-to-use interface and low costs of adding the specified functionality.

As the client has requested, xCart was also used to prevent the need of constructing the online store from scratch, and to develop it efficiently to the client’s needs.

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Architecture

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Architecture

Functional design

Based on the functional requirements the client already had, the workflows and specifications of the application were easily and efficiently constructed. Since the base of the project – the shop’s frame-work – was already known, the rest of the functions have been architected around it.

Architectural design

The most important issue of the architectural design was the interaction between different modules. At least two main modules have been identified to be directly linked into the same user account. The easy navigation between modules and the ability of the webmaster to easily change content in both modules has been considered of the most importance. Also, the client request to be able to com-pletely modify the layouts of the marketing pages, independently to the shop, was a real challenge.

Technology details

Since osCommerce has been chosen as framework for the eCommerce part of the application, PHP + MySQL have been automatically selected to be used for the rest of the application, and several hosting solutions have been identified as meeting the application’s needs.

The products sold by the client have a particularity: they are flexible in terms of parts used for building the media system as well as optional, bundled, screens and accessories. As a special feature, the cli-ent needed to know, at any given moment, the final price and the monthly rate if they would choose to buy it using credit systems. The programmers gave two choices: one using JavaScript and the other one AJAX to update the price and compute the monthly rate, both triggered by the change of options. Due to the lack of compatibility issues, we used the simpler JavaScript only solution.

Functionaldesign Architectural

designTechnology

detailsGraphic specifications

and mockups

Implementationschedule

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Architecture

Graphic specifications and mockups

Several meetings with the client’s marketing team have been organized in order to create the main concepts of the general look & feel of the website.

Being also a presentation website, the graphic design needed to be outstanding. Our designers have presented several design ideas for the main page, based on the content specified by the client.

Only when the design concept was correctly understood by our designers and approved by the client, we started designing the rest of the pages.

Implementation schedule

Having all those preliminary details agreed on, a timeframe with milestones and completion date have been approved. This depended on the correct synchronization between our development team and the marketing team that was to provide the content (text and images) for the static pages, as well as the shop’s administration team that needed to collect and upload all details of the products to be sold.

The launch date was also synchronized with the start of the marketing campaign, that was deploy-ing both online and offline. It was very important to have everything on time, as planned, so that the money would be well spent on advertising and that the new products expected to become available from the suppliers to have special launch prices, giving us the opportunity to create special offers for the visitors.

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Development

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Graphic designintegration

Codedevelopment Testing Development Client

feedback

Development

Graphic design integration

Having the design in a static form as a Photoshop file from our designers, the HTML integration has begun. This has proven to be a very time consuming process, especially as it had to be done twice: first the osCommerce templates framework have been modified and second the same look has been implemented for the marketing pages.

Code development

During the development of the code, the client requested many new features, on top of customizing the shop part. Two parallel threads have evolved for the implementation: the marketing module and the other the shop features. The marketing module was also built in two stages: a database admin interface for the page content using an online WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) editor and a front end display of the content.

Testing

As one of the most important phases in development, it assures you that the work done so far is correct and fits the requirements of the application. With this under consideration, a preliminary func-tional test of the whole system has been performed and all visible problems have been tracked down. A second phase of the system was completed to make sure the application would work ok under stressful conditions, within the expected traffic limits.

Then, the system was released directly on the production server in order to test it even more in real life conditions.

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Development

Documentation

Throughout the development of the system every step and procedure has been documented. Once, in the final phase everything has been put everything together in such a manner that it will be easily used while supporting the application.

Client feedback

Constant feedback from the client has been received during development. It was very useful as it helped FYB’s team better understand the way they expect the functionality to be implemented inter-face wise. We have managed to develop a very easy to use application, both for the customers and for the administrator

The beta version of the project was presented to the client on time and once agreed with the market-ing team, it has been released.

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Delivery

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Delivery

Client training

Using the beta version, together with the website administrator a few scenarios have been run and also the main functionalities have been presented and explained. We also had the privilege to have some good tutorials on how to use the shop. Also a small user manual has been created. Online training has been followed, explaining each step of the process.

Delivery

By moving all the files on the real server and integrating with the SSL account, we considered the application to be live. All documents had been sent to the customer when all requirements were met.

The client was officially accepted the project completion and we moved to the next stage of our col-laboration.

Support

Offering continuous support and answering client feedback lead sometimes to new features, some-times solved by going back and insisting on the training part that was not understood correctly or repeated enough, and sometimes by agreeing to build new modules and add-ons.

Clienttraining Delivery Support

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FYB RomaniaAddress: Calea Rahovei Street / No. 266-268 Building no. 3 / Ground Floor / Room 17Postal Code 050912 / Bucharest / Romania

Telephone: +4031.425.21.28Fax: +4021.456.05.54Email: contact@fyb.roTwitter: @fybBlog: www.fyb.ro/blog