As a Sitefinity Platinum Partner, we know all the details of the CMS and the potential it holds for our clients, but were particularly pleased with the Ecommerce functionality.
When one of our retail clients, Katz ACE Hardware, wanted to automate certain parts of their business processes, we found the Sitefinity Ecommerce solution to be a valuable and powerful component of the overall website redesign. Its extensibility allowed us to customize the feature, deviating slightly from its traditional Ecommerce purpose. We turned Ecommerce into a scheduling and rental function that leads to a checkout page.
Streamlining a Process
Katz ACE Hardware competes against big-box stores as a retailer that provides a variety of products and services ranging from interior paint to party supplies and equipment rentals. Prior to our website redesign for Katz, they manually received inquiries and processed requests for equipment rentals. The Ecommerce function now allows customers to reserve equipment for a specific date before finalizing the details of the agreement over the phone. This improves the website’s SEO and streamlines the reservation process.
By implementing Sitefinity’s Ecommerce solution, Katz customers now can review customized pricing options based on the date and length of time they want to rent equipment. Ecommerce speeds up the process for both the customer and the business. Plus, our development team customized and personalized the email automatically sent to the customer after they place an order.
Products Now Easier to Manage
Our developers built-in Ecommerce variations that allow Katz to post multiple product images and descriptions, add new equipment as it becomes available while still allowing for variations in price and dates. We also customized the product detail page to show related products, a function that wasn’t available at the time we started development but has since become part of the basic functionality of Sitefinity Ecommerce.
Though we didn’t implement the custom shipping features in this particular project, we’re looking forward to our next opportunity to do so. This is a wonderful function that allows customer service departments to easily choose shipping options from a shipping provider based on weight and cost of the item, thus saving a lot of time.
Overall, the Sitefinity Ecommerce function enabled us to significantly enhance the website’s user experience and administrative content management capabilities for our client and their customers. As a result, we eliminated several cumbersome steps in the rental process and provided seamless automation.
About the Author
Melanie Salas is the Director of Web Development for ZAG Interactive, a full-service digital agency in Glastonbury, Conn. Melanie leads the development team responsible for identifying the most effective strategies to advance clients’ business interests. She has significant experience developing on Sitefinity and various content management systems. Melanie can be reached at msalas@zaginteractive.com and 860-633-4818.