Example of e-Commerce Web Site - My Cartridge Online Shop
The MyCartridge online shop has been set up to provide printer supplies directly
to individuals and businesses throughout the United Kingdom, in many cases working
in partnership with leading UK charities. When entering the shop via one of the
charity links, a donation (percentage of purchase) is made to that charity for every
item purchased from the web site. In addition, the store "look and feel" is themed
to match the charity colours and logo.
Requirements
The requirements for the web site were as follows:
- To contain hundreds of products.
- Be easily expandable to thousands of products, if necessary.
- Make it easy to find the correct print cartridge for the relevant printer.
- Incorporate an advanced search facility.
- Provide affiliate theme functionality to work with charities.
- Provide good order handling and reporting.
- Easy to update the product catalogue in-house.
- Be secure.
The Solution
The solution for MyCartridge was to use BVCommerce shopping basket software with some customisation by Discover IT to tailor it to requirements.
It runs on a Windows 2003 Server with IIS-6 and uses ASP.Net 2.0 technology. It uses a SQL Server 2005 database to contain the product information which is dynamically published when a page is loaded. |
|
 |
 |
|
The shop currently contains over 900 products in 14 different “departments” (printer
manufacturer). Each "department" is split into 3 sub-departments -printer type (inkjet,
mono laser and colour laser). In turn, each of these is split into further sub-departments
(printer model). This makes it quite simple to find the correct cartridge for your
printer.
Each product is displayed on its own page with a photograph, description and price. |
The site also includes an advanced search tool, which provides a full-text search on the product database, searching on both product titles and descriptions.
The search can be on combinations of search words and also word stems. |
 |
 |
|
The checkout system calculates and adds VAT. The shipping costs are calculated
based on the type of print cartridges in the order and the total value of the order.
Payments can be made by cheque or credit card. The checkout is linked to the Protx
online payment clearance system which clears the credit card payment in real-time.
The site is secured with a digital security certificate from Thawte.
|
Charity Themes
The most important feature of the web site is the ability to work with charities
to help fund-raising.
Below you can see some examples of the charity themes. By entering the My Cartridge
web site using a special charity identifier (for example www.mycartridge.co.uk/dogstrust), the site can be viewed
with unique styling for the charity. All orders received when visitors have entered
via the charity link will be logged and a percentage of the sale paid to the charity.
Click on any of the links below to see how it works, and perhaps you can support
your favourite charity when next ordering printer cartridges.
