Random Website Design Comments from Website Concept to Launch, purely shown to give the complexities / questions / updates that show up during a complex ecommerce system development:
[Web Company] Believe you need a customised ecommerce website that has a bespoke spreadsheet import facility. The product will be gardening products but they will expand at a later date to stock other products. We understand you need an import facility using a spreadsheet (5 thousand products) to fill the database with products
Happy to say our investigation and project requirements have been completed and the quote and duration of project has been decided, feel free to read below and get back to us with your thoughts.
We see that the referred websites are shopping cart & e-commerce websites for selling gardening products. We understand that you want us to develop a site with similar functionality.
We have worked on several online store / e-commerce website projects before. Please find below some of the online store / e-commerce websites developed by us. Here are the key features that will be available on the website developed by us. This feature list is prepared based on the reference websites and the standard features available on other shopping cart websites. Please let us know if you want any addition / alternation over it. We will then come up with our revised price quote, if applicable.
- Site Administrator
- Manage product categories
- Manage manufacturers and printer families
- Manage products along with product images
- Manage product attributes
- Manage related products
- Manage featured products
- Manage banners (images of fixed dimension will be uploaded)
- Manage static pages through WYSIWYG editor
- View online order summary and details
- Public visitor
- Browse through various product categories and manufacturers
- Search for products (manufacturer, printer family, model no., color)
- View product details page
- Add products to shopping cart
- Add products to wishlist
- View cart
- Checkout
- Sign up
- Login
- Registered user
- Make payment through PayPal
- Upon successful payment, returned to Thank You page
- Review past orders
- Write review on the products
Our scope of work will be as follows.
- Website design (2 concepts with necessary revisions. Logo provided by yourself in vector format)
- HTML/CSS conversion
- Creating up to 10 static pages (content and images provided by you)
- Web programming of the dynamic pages and functionalities as per the above mentioned feature list
We make the following assumptions:
- The website will be in English language only.
- All the products will be managed through the back end Admin panel. No product data will be fetched from any external website.
- An XLS import feature will be provided in the Admin panel.
- Entering / uploading the product details into the system is not considered within our scope of work.
- No shipping integration will be made with any external shipping service provider.
- Our price quote does not include creation of any banner or custom animation.
- Domain registration and web hosting will be done from your end. The server will support for Linux, Apache, PHP & MySQL.
- As suggested above, online payment integration will be done with PayPal. You will obtain the necessary PayPal account and forward the details to us for integration. You will also have SSL certificate installed on your server, if necessary.
- Development of any product comparison feature is not assumed in the scope of work.
Our price quote for this project is detailed in the proposal document
Estimated time for development is 8 – 9 weeks. This excludes our off days and your feedback time.
Payment terms: 50% advance, 50% on completion.
[Website Customers] Thanks for the prompt for quoting us for an ecommerce website, we specifically need the functionality mentioned below. Can you confirm that the functionality below will be incorporated in the project.
1, a generic search box
2, a 3 way product / family / model dropdown check like this
3 The XLS import function – The spreadsheet will have the following columns for import
- product type menu (5 choices)
- product
- product number
- colour
- Image (will be a reference to the image in a file)
One product would be imported with each line entry. If the image field is empty no image will be displayed
Sorry it’s taken so long for us to reply but my partner and I have been busy . We did like the design of the front page but I feel the bubbles on the centre just soften the image and reduce the impact of the page . The look we were really after was pretty similar to the example we sent you of the example website . It seems that quite a lot of sites are using this technique of using contrasting side bars to project the centre of the page giving it more impact. Look forward to hearing from you soon.
More than happy to settle up the final invoice as the work has been completed to our satisfaction as usual, just a few reservations on my part really. I am pleased with the way the site has turned out and look forward to the business getting on its feet. My business partner is emailing you a few minor things we would like to change, but my concerns are really about how you were going to get our site noticed as when we spoke originally you talked about SEO. As you know when we originally spoke we were quoted a 9 week time period to complete our project and as you will remember we sourced a local web designer as others all used designers in India. Now while I’m not particularly bothered about the time it’s taken, which I know is mainly down to us. As you know I’m happy with the finished design and the service and support you have given us over the development of the site. As I’ve had my own businesses for the last 20 years I worry about paying the final amount as in the past I’ve found it’s hard to get anything done after you’ve paid.
Could you please just let me know your plans for the SEO and when you will be implementing this and then we can make the payment. Also when we first met we briefly spoke about a second site using the same format as the ecommerce site. Could you quote for this please? I don’t like emails they’re so impersonal, please don’t take any of this the wrong way. We’ve enjoyed working with you to get our design right.
I’ve managed to ruin something on the website. I was trying to familiarise myself with the CMS software in the admin panel and in an attempt to alter the OEM logos on the brands page to standard logos I appear to have removed one entirely. Unfortunately it has now been completely removed from the website. See screen shot below. How are the web developers getting in wit the amendments & alterations? I’ve noticed a few changes.
Regarding the ecommerce function I think there is a problem. I decided to check it and place an order. Everything goes ok until you get to the paypal screen. It charges in USD and then converts to GBP, e.g I purchased a cartridge for £3.99 but during the payment process it indicated $3.99. Paypal then made the conversion from USD to GBP and the final amount is £2.55. See attached image. Actually its my mistake. I’ve just updated the PayPal account to make GBP to primary currency.
[Web Company]
- A free text search box will be provided, which will search in product, product family and product number fields of the product database.
- A product product family / model dropdown search will also be provided.
- The XLS import feature, as per your field specification, will be provided. Please note however that we are not clear about the term ‘product menu’. We require plain text entry of products in the first column. If you have meant that the products will be available as dropdown menus on each row of the XLS, we will not be able to import that.
- It will not be possible for us to integrate directly with merchant banks. Please note that PayPal does offer a facility whereby the visitor is not required to leave your website for making payment. He can put in his credit card details directly on your website and the transaction is processed in the background through PayPal. We can implement this model for you. For this you will need to obtain ‘PayPal Website Payment Pro’ account and also have SSL certificate installed on your server.
1 admin section admin > manage product – Need to be able to search for a product by code / cartridge – Result: In admin panel ‘Search Product’ have been added.
2 admin section admin > manage product – when you click ‘next’ it only advanced 1 item and doesnt go to the end of the product list – example epson have 1127 products but only showing 73 in admin panel – Result: This problem is fixed.
3 Product Display – Need a search result where you search by a product (example abc1) then you get the pack (set) / then all the colours in that main pack (set) ??
For for individual products (example abc1 ) searches – system to show pack (set) at the start of all results – This problem is fixed.
4 admin functions > show all products > need an ‘add product function’ – Result ‘Add product’ is added at the admin panel
5 browser warnings – When you select a product put it in your basket then select ‘continue shopping’ you get a browser warning – Result: This problem is fixed.
6 browser problem – google chrome display problem when adding to basket – Result: This problem is fixed.
7 browser problem – google chrome – when you click to ‘continue shopping’ you get directed to an incorrect page – Result: This problem is fixed.
9 product display – product names indented – Result: This problem is fixed.
Updates
1 Guest Checkout – Advise against this as after investigation we have discovered for implementing such functionality, we would need to change the database as well as coding structure. For this, there will be additional time and costs that would be involved.
2 Ecommerce Products – Waiting to re-import – if you have the final Product spreadsheet that you send to me can you re-send it please. Please check and advise. More updates to come shortly. We have modified the design as per this mail. Attached please find the revised design concept and let us know your thoughts.
[Website Owners] Thanks for the new design James, I really like this one. My partner is on holiday at the moment , when he gets back I’ll run it by him asap and get back to you. He has looked at the new design and he really likes it too. So we’re good to go ahead. Thanks again for your efforts to achieve the right design for us.
Thanks for the email. I’ve spoken to the business owner about the site and we both feel we need to meet with you to discuss the areas we need tweaking. There have been several emails from both ways and it doesn’t seem to be progressing towards completion through emails, as we are having problems describing what we want in an email In your latest email you say the site has been moved to the root. Forgive me for my ignorance but I have no idea what this means, The boss thinks this means the site is now live. Please tell me that this is not so as we have no facility to take payments, the site does still not operate to our brief and we have no details on the site of who or what we are. I would be grateful if we could arrange a time to meet to discuss this. We both work late in the week so I was wondering if you could spare some time one weekend. Both of us feel it would be beneficial if meet with you to discuss our comments as we do not believe we are conveying our messages correctly over email. The best way to achieve this would be to sit in front of a screen and show you what we are trying to get across to you.