GOb2b Blogs

Shopfront has a Category and Sub Category field on each product. These can be synchronised from a variety of fields in your sage system and then used to create a dynamic...

Your website should follow standard paradigms if you want your customers to navigate your ecommerce site easily. Shopfront has top and left side menus that can be used for general navigation and catalogue navigation. These are interchangeable and can be combined into one side or one top menu depending on taste and the structure of your catalogue.

A bread crumb, from the fairy tale Hansel and Gretel, lets you customer know where they are on the site.

We can log each product that your customer visits in your online shop and then display these so that they can quickly go back to something they looked at previously.

A sitemap for your site can be automatically generated. This is a single page with links to all the departments and products on the site. These work well for small catalogues but are of limited value for large catalogues as the resulting huge page is slow to load and difficult to navigate.

Mega Menus are a popular way of giving your customers an at a glance view of your catalogue. They are a 2 dimensional drop down grouped menu based on the department structure of your site. They can be made to look very attractive and we have enhanced them with images for some customers.

We have designed our search algorithm around our customer base. 80% of our customers are B2B or a combination of B2B & B2C so searching by product code is important for regular customers (or agents) looking for known stock-codes. So Stock Code and Manufacturer’s (Supplier’s) Part Number are prioritised.

Our search is based on the words and code you have entered into all the product data fields. So if you describe every ‘bus’ as a ‘bus’ then the search will return nothing for ‘coach’ or ‘charabang’.

As we are caching the stock value it is important we do not make an online sale based on an out of date stock position. Shopfront’s full integration with your accounting software means that as the user reaches their final checkout step, the Sage stock database is queried one final time to get the exact stock position. If there is insufficient stock to fulfil the order, either:

If we had to get 40 or 50 stock positions from your office every time we rendered a single page the website would run very slowly. So our ecommerce software uses a cascade of memory and database caches to keep the stock position. By default the cache value expires every 4 hours and the value is also updated when a sale is made through the website.