Case Study - Indian Handicrafts
Application: B2B MarketplaceIndustry: Handicrafts
Aim: To design a B2B website where handicrafts buyers can browse through fully featured catalogs of different handicraft manufacturers and suppliers.
Background: This website was conceptualised to help handicrafts manufacturers, small artisans, ngos and others have a good online presence. Being found by search engines was of primary importance from the perspective of sellers. From buyers perspective, the website had to hold out the promise of greater choice of suppliers as well as products.
Objectives: The objectives that our development team had to accomplish were:
- Developing a site that would perform outstandingly on search engines, given the intense competition in this segment
- Create different sections for buyers and sellers
- Create several levels of admins to enable convenient usage
- Provide easy to update product catalogs
Solution: The development team created a user-friendly interface such that a non-technical user can use to upload their company information and product details. At the user end, the site has an intuitive navigation that allows website visitors to conveniently browse through the various product catalogs and buy them online or send bulk inquiries. Architecture is search engine friendly and allows for quick indexing and better performance in search engine result pages.
The admin section is developed in such a manner that the administrator need not have much technical knowledge.
The website login area is divided into three different panels:
- Master Admin Panel
- Company Admin Panel
- User Panel
Technical Background:
Technologies Used:
PHP and MySql on the server-side
HTML, AJAX, CSS and Javascript on the client-side
Features:
The features for the above mentioned types of users/panels are:
Master Admin Panel
Suppliers:
- Can control the different suppliers
- Can change the user-name and password of supplier admins
- Can add new suppliers
Registered Users: Master admin can view and manage different registered users
Articles: Can add new articles related to different handicraft products
Catalog: Can manage the different products and can also publish them
RSS: Can generate RSS feeds for different products
Edit Mails: Has the ability to send automated emails to suppliers
Supplier Admin Panel:
Supplier admin is one who manages its products and profile. Features provided here are:
- Manage Products: The supplier admin has the authority to manage their product catalogs. They can add categories, sub categories, products and their details
- View Orders: Can view the orders received for their different products through the website
- Add and View Suppliers: Can view and add the suppliers for their products
- Update Order Status
- Manage buyers who register on their catalog sub-site
User Panel:
A user can enjoy the following features:
- View Products: An end-user can view the different products published by the different handicraft suppliers
- Search: Can search products by name, price, type and usage
- Place orders online using the integrated online payment gateway on the website
- Inquiry Form: The user can fill an inquiry form for bulk inquiries or for custom product development
