Client Profile - [ XPart ]
XPart is part of the multinational, blue chip company,
Caterpillar Inc.. XPart sell parts and accessories for MG and Rover cars, along with a growing
'All Makes' brand of accessories. Their website is multifaced and the largest
website project undertaken by UK Websystems at the time.
The website has two parts. It features a dealer Extranet wheere the dealers
can login and view communications and other dealer-only material online and
download it to their computer. This was soon expanded to offer an online shop,
selling Accessories for MG and Rover vehicles, along with selected All Makes
products. The administration website for this project was completely re-written
to support multiple user accounts, along
with a full user permissions system. This allows XPart to create new user
accounts and limit what those users can view, edit and delete within the administration
website.
In addition, the website supports multiple languages, both on the dealer website
(as dealers are spread throughout Europe) and within the online shop.
The online shop underwent
heavy revision and updates both on the public side and the administration
side, mainly due to the features required for the shop and also to integrate
changes in eCommerce technology and practices
over the past year. This online shop became the forerunner of UK Websystems' flagship
eCommerce solution, eShopsUK.
As with the latest eShopsUK platform, the invoices, order confirmations and despatch notes are all generated as PDF files. PDF files allow for completely customisable designs and truly add that professional edge to any online shop.
The XPart shop also has the Multishop feature that is in our current eShopsUK platform. This allows the client to run multiple shops off one main shop. For example, XPart also have an online shop on the popular MG and Rover enthusiasts' website, MG-Rover.org. This shop carries the look and feel of the MG-Rover.org website and for all intents and purposes, could be a completely seperate shop. It is however running off the main XPart shop. Any orders placed on the MG-Rover.org shop end up in the same administration website as the orders on the main shop, in addition stock is administered from the one admin website, with the ability to control which products and categories appear on which shop.
In essence it allows you to offer white label copies of your shop or subsections there of to other 3rd parties without having to run multiple online shops with the additional overhead of order and stock management.
Its also quite feasable to use the system to run a multitude of shops aimed at niche markets all controlled and administered via the one online shop admin website. This benefits from each shop having a presence within search engine rankings and with careful tuning can prove very effective.
