Good Afternoon All,
I am a C# developer and have been working with a client who sell Gardening Products (UK Based) and we have recently launched a new brand and website http://www.gardenwants.com all powered by nopCommerce 3.5.
We have had a development process of about 6 months on this project, and I have put some considerable effort into this build so I thought I would summarise some of the stuff we have going on behind the scenes here which is a combination of plugins, external processes and customisations. We are still developing and polishing some of the functionality which will be ongoing for some time. None of the nop core code has been changed, and we intend to keep up to date and upgrade as new nop versions are released.
Overview
- The Theme was purchased from a third party and then customised.
- Payment is handled by Sage Pay
- Some third party plugins were purchased for certain functionality
- I built some plugins that didn't exist, for example we have a postcode address lookup system using software the company already used.
- There are a number of commercial features enabled, for purposes of visitor tracking, affiliate programs, advertising and so on.
Companion Portal
I developed a separate administration portal to assist with bulk updates and stock management, from here we facilitate invoice printing, barcode scanning and bulk product management. Due to the catalogue size (soon to be well in excess of 10,000 items) we have had to do this to help the administrators be more efficient and to allow us to track in more details things like stock quantity changes. In some cases we bypass the nopcommerce API and directly query the data. We have also added a handful of tables that record some of the actions that occur particularly stock management. Some of you may have seen issues with stock management on busy sites so we have addressed some of these issues. As everything is scanned before we ship - we can better track what’s going on and a pick and pack process facilitates this. We also use a third party shipping company and we communicate via API to receive tracking numbers. We also have a completely new invoice printing routine. (we do not use the built in invoice generator).
Free Product Offer
We offer free plants with the purchase of other products. I built an extensive “Free Product Offer Manager” plugin which allows the customers to attach free products to their order when they spend over certain thresholds, and the website will offer those at certain points in the process.
Continuity Plan
We are offering subscription based services, and a plugin and extensive management system is in place behind the scenes to manage this. There is so much going on here that it wouldn’t be fitting to explain in this post, but in a nutshell we are taking monthly payments and then auto-generating nopcommerce orders at set intervals based on the users selected plan and settings along with additional account pages available to the customer when they login.
Reporting
We have a separate SQL Reporting Services instance running alongside nopCommerce. We have 8-10 custom reports at present which we will add to as required to provide requested BI to the client.
Services/Additional Tools
We have built some services that run alongside the site – a set of command line tools that are schedule to run to perform operations such as stock checking, product data synchronisation and integrity checking.
For those of you interested in SEO, this is a new site and we have seen a nice growth in search engine traffic (while that is not a main focus for us) which is nice to see that out of the box, nop does perform well in this area and has all of the tools you would expect to need.
I hope this post is useful for those of you using nopcommerce or thinking about it.
Thanks for Reading
Happy to answer any questions (if I can).
Chris
