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Adhost Blog

Web development

Ecommerce Case Study for Boma Sterling Silver Jewelry

A Shiny New Web Site for Boma Sterling Silver Jewelry

Boma Sterling Silver has a reputation for being the leader in the sterling-silver industry based on their quality product, first-class customer service and trendy designs. However, they needed new Web site to match their reputation. Boma came to the Adhost Development team with a basket of big goals for their new Web site, and we worked with them to find an affordable, flexible solution. The new site…

• Functions as both a retail catalog and a wholesale shopping cart
• Integrates with Boma’s proprietary back-office system using XML
• Allows wholesalers to customize and buy many different products from the same page
• Includes product pages which show detailed views of all stone options – with the design differing for retail catalog shoppers and wholesale shoppers
• Uses AJAX on the product pages to quickly switch product names and detail images when a stone color is clicked

Read about the rest of the cool features on our Boma Ecommerce case study.

PCI Compliance and Ecommerce Sites

Online and other merchants are now required to comply with Visa / Mastercard Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards [PCI-DSS]. You can learn more about that online at the Visa and Mastercard sites or a host of other sites as well. Just type ‘PCI DSS compliance’ into Google.

Wikipedia has a useful overview: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_Card_Industry_Data_Security_Standard

and we have a brief description on our site as well: PCI Compliancy.

For online businesses that need to 1) adjust final order amounts after the original transaction or 2) perform subsequent charges or credits against the original card, storage of the card locally is no longer a realistic option without substantial outlays for hardware, software and programming [servers, firewalls, anti-virus programs and encryption coding].

This can be mitigated by employing a Credit Card Gateway that supports what is frequently called a ‘Tokenization’ solution that stores the credit card for you on their PCI compliant servers and allows you to perform later transactions against the stored card by way of a ‘token’ provided at the time of the original transaction.

We have researched several options for our ecommerce clients. Contact your sales representative for more information at 206-404-9000 or 1-888-234-6781.

Is Your Web Site Frozen in Time, Forgotten or Just Plain Funky?

Web sites are often out of sight and out of mind – but busy keeping customers away because they’re unattractive, unclear, unusable, unfriendly – just pick your ‘un’ word. We’ve had the pleasure of hurting our eyes on many such sites over the years.

Recently, we were contacted by a firm with a site no one at the company had looked at – literally – for months. The marketing person with responsibilities for maintaining the site had actually been gone for some time and evidently hadn’t mentioned the site to their replacement. Fortunately, their old school e-commerce shopping cart was still taking occasional orders that went straight to the warehouse for fulfillment. Finally, someone realized these orders were coming from a web site and took a look at it.

After finding their shades and clicking around the glaringly out-of-date site, they started shopping around for some Seattle web development help and found Adhost. Our initial call revealed that they had TWO sites. A brochure web site – that no one knew how to manage or update (natch) -  was wrapped around a separate and very creaky e-commerce cart. It was a no-brainer to recommend an updated cart with Content Management Features that would allow them to manage all their content – brochure and product – from one consolidated web-based administration area. We got ‘em up and running in about 3 and half weeks. They aren’t challenging Amazon.com just yet, but the orders are coming in and now they don’t need shades to look at the sites.

Looking at the bill was not a problem either. We did this for less than the guesstimate they had generated internally. So, the lesson? I don’t know. The only things I can swear to are that sky is blue, sea is green and clam shells make great ash trays. However, I’m pretty sure that when it comes to ROI, a well-designed and promoted Web site can get your message out for much less than other media channels. And on the Amazon thing, well, we made some SEO and PPC recommendations to them and you never know…

Perhaps, it’s time to dust off your site and invest in a fresh Web design, an e-commerce solution, or a content management system. If so, give us a jingle. We’d be happy to put on our shades and look at your site. Contact the Adhost sales team at 1-888-234-6781 to discuss your options or visit the Adhost Development site.