Rockwell e-shop
What we did
- Web Design,
- Web Development,
- Drupal 6,
- Ubercart,
- MySQL,
- PHP,
- Creation of multiple categories,
- Custom module for multiple taxonomy terms imports from a CSV file,
- Custom development to provide clients with the possibility of requesting an automatic check of a company’s European VAT number validation from the VIES VAT database,
- UPS shipping,
- Custom ELTA module, for both national and international shipping (ELTA is a private Greek shipping company which is less expensive than UPS).
Industry
Client
The Context
Rockwell is a company old of 4 generations, initially specialised in manufacturing luxury cutlery items and alloys for cutlery items; it nowadays retails a multitude of other items dispatched in numerous categories for any everyday activity.
It is the reseller in Greece for luxurious and selective – when it comes to choosing a representative - industries and companies who have invested him with their confidence because of his know-how and quality.
But it is a bit more than that… It represents a network of stores in Greece, with a well-built corporate identity, which work as franchisees. This also reflects the potential of the brand.
Challenges & Objectives
Rockwell needed a website fully representative of its personality and concept. The owner of the brand also wanted us to find a way to make apparent to its public the existence of a huge variety of items in his store. In fact he needed us to create for him a multi-store e-shop, which would reflect quality all over it. Thus, we have built for Rockwell a fully-customized e-commerce website also aiming to present the uniqueness that characterizes Rockwell, its tradition-history, collaborations with important brands on the market of the cutlery accessories, but also Rockwell's unique know-how regarding its industry. The website also aimed at selling internationally in a difficult social and economic context in Greece.
Whilst Rockwell has been manufacturing & selling its own steel-alloys all over the world for 4 generations, its brand is mainly known locally. The website is part of an effort to improve its reputation and visibility globally, by promoting the brand and reach new markets.
The Solution
Our first concrete objective was to sort out the store’s numerous articles in a proper way. We’ve created 800 categories of products subdivided in 5 levels of sub-categories, to classify the products and present them, in THE spot where someone needing each one of those, would look for them.
We also had to use the brand’s identity to impregnate our web design with it. One most sensitive chapter was the one of the Cart’s page: most cart pages on the Internet are dull. The buyer should neither be lost during the shopping process in too many steps, nor feel that he is on just another template like cart page. At no point should the client feel that he is on an extension of the e-shop and not on a page which is a part of it.
Rockwell sells more than 7000 products, one of the main challenges was to provide the tools to import massively all these products into the website. Thanks to our Products' Mass-import, all the products are imported in CSV files and then integrated seamlessly in the website along with all their characteristics (titles, descriptions, prices, weights, dimensions, brands, categories of products and even products pictures). This method allows Rockwell to solely care about data that it wants to import, and not about the way those will be displayed on the website; everything is imported and displayed consistently on the website.
Since Rockwell wanted to be able to sell online to both individuals and retailers, we have created a special area for the retailers only where they can find the products at special prices.
Another challenge was also to correctly deal with VAT in Europe, as the VAT mechanism can reveal quite painful. We have given any European company the possibility of requesting an automatic check of its European VAT number's validity through the checkout page. The validation is requested from the VIES VAT database, in order to dispense the company of the VAT in its purchase (according to the European Legislation in the frame of European transactions, a company with a valid VAT number can be exempted of paying the amount corresponding to the VAT). As this seems to be normal, you will notice that most e-commerce websites don't even deal with that or don't handle the taxes correctly.