Eye Candy Online
With two previous projects under our belts with
Eyecandy, the Berkshire based company turned again to UK Websystems for
their next online project. The Eyecandy Shop site was designed to be a
'Create your own' site to allow visitors to choose what substrate they
wanted, either Canvas, Acrylic or Framed Print and for them to upload
the photo and complete the order. The site worked well since it was
launched in 2006, but even still there were improvements that we could
make.
So a new platform was designed by UK Websystems to
build upon those foundations but to add even more automation and
technology that recent upgrades to the servers would allow. Two new key features were cornerstones of the new platform. The first
was a built in image editor, which allows customers to rotate, crop or
zoom in on the photo they upload in order to frame the ideal print, all in real-time.
The second key feature was the ability to white label the
platform for Eyecandy's clients, so that they could offer a 'Create
your own' website, personalised to their clients. This feature was
built around the Multi-shop function in the eShopsUK platform and
allowed them to control both which substrates where offered on a
particular site but also offer different pricing structures and size
options for the sites. Basically they could completely tailor the site
to their client's requirements, both in product offering and of course
appearance & design.
This had been a feature of the previous Eyecandyshop website, but
was nowhere near as sophisticated. The new platform went live in mid
2009 and by the end of 2009 had numerous shops running off it,
including shops for household names, such as Corel and Moonpig.
Developments were also made to the process after the order is placed. With the old website Eyecandy would have to download the customer's photo and do all the layout work themselves to produce the image that is printed onto the substrate. This is now automatically handled by the website, so when an order is placed, a production-ready image is generated at print size at 300dpi and the team at Eyecandy then download this image and sent it off to the printer - greatly reducing the overhead associated with handling an order for them, which naturally makes them more productive and saves them money.
Its also an example of how we at UK Websystems go out of our way to integrate any website we produce into the way the client's business works. If we can take some of the workload off your staff and via automation help you to become more profitable, we feel that we've done our job right! A website, especially an online shop should not cause extra work and be an inconvenience for you when orders come in. We want to make the whole order handling process as easy and streamlined as we possibly can.
There
are further enhancements planned still which will build again on the
website and offer even more functionality for Eyecandy and their
clients.
Although in general the design of the various client websites look similar, this is only because they've been happy to run with a lightly customised version. The technology does allow for a complete difference in both appearance and even operation - as the Wow Photo site shows. The Wow Photo site is run for a company which allows people to redeem points from a well-known loyalty card in exchange for canvases / Acryllic or Frame prints. These codes are then entered into the website and from the code, the website can determine which product & size is being ordered. The customer then uploads their photo, fills in their address and the order is taken.
All the other versions of the site run in a normal online shop manner where it takes credit card payements in real-time via our Sage Pay / Protx integration.
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Article Last Updated 29th November 2009
