eCommerce is very common these days. Everyone is selling online! Perhaps that is something you are interested in doing as well. While it is common, getting an eCommerce site working properly is not always easy. I recently launched the eCommerce site for the Spartan Motors company store. The website: shop.spartanmotors.com sells merchandise for Spartan Motors, Utilimaster, Smeal, Ladder Tower, and UST brands.
First of all, I want to give credit where it is due. The project was a culmination of work between myself and Jarrod Erdody of Erdody Studios. This eCommerce solution leverages the WooCommerce platform to sell products online. Today, WooCommerce is one of the top eCommerce platforms available. It plugs right into WordPress making it a natural step for small business owners to begin to sell online. WooCommerce has many extensions available to help scale the product. Therefore, it stands out as not only one of the easiest eCommerce platforms to get into, but also one of the most cost-effective.
This particular eCommerce build involved two huge goals that I needed to meet:
- It needed to be easy to use and find products
- It needed to integrate with the company store’s new point of sale system.
First of all, I tackled the information architecture with the company store team pretty rapidly. We took an afternoon whiteboard session and came up with our categorizations. The feedback has been tremendous, and people are happily finding the products they are looking for so far.
The next step was to integrate the site with the company’s new point of sale system from Clover. The point of sale integration utilizes a program that runs in the middle of the two applications. Because of that, inventory can now fully sync any time it is adjusted online or in store. The setup proved to be challenging. To make it happen, new processes are in place. Heavier controls are in place on how to handle, upload, and process inventory for sale. With these processes established, the results are showing an excellent eCommerce experience.