Case Study
A scalable ecommerce solution for Fine Fragrance Collection
Fine Fragrance Collection is a generic perfume retailer – one of the first in South Africa, and certainly one of the most successful. They came to Netgen for help with this success and the growth in their business. They were using WordPress and WooCommerce to handle all of their orders, and simply couldn’t keep up. They needed a bespoke ecommerce solution.
Making the switch from plug-and-play to a custom ecommerce solution
Their business has two sites – one for the public consumer and one for agents who resell their perfumes. Both were operating on general plugins on two different WordPress sites, and the system for processing orders was quite manual. Each order needed to be looked at by an employee – confirming the order details and payment, picking and packing the order, and then shipping it.
Our first step for creating an ecommerce solution that worked for them was to combine their two websites into one portal. We made the choice to create an entirely custom front end website and backend for the business.
The goal was to automate and integrate as much of the process as possible. This meant looking at connecting their online shop to secure payment gateways and their warehousing solution for stock management. This was accomplished by integrating the various APIs into our custom portal. We also linked admin functionality for the backend maintenance.
Scalability and looking to the future
One of the biggest challenges faced with this development was thinking about the future of the Fine Fragrance business. They’ve experienced massive growth and things aren’t slowing down for them. This meant that the ecommerce solution we built would need to be scalable and robust.
This influenced the technology we chose for the project. MSSQL database was selected to ensure that cloud-based scalability was an option for later. We’re also investigating hosting environment options that will allow us to scale resources as needed in the future.
It’s always exciting to work with a business that’s in the process of growing. It’s both good for the South African economy and good for challenging our developers.
