eCommerce Development for Corney & Barrow Asian Branches

Portal multisite solution for wholesale and retail order placement

Client

Corney & Barrow is one of the longest established independent wine merchants in the UK with over 240 years of history. Recently, they entered the Asian market and opened branches in Hong Kong and Singapore. This fact determined their need to develop a B2B and B2C eCommerce solution for wholesalers and retailers in Asia.

Challenge

The client’s core requirement was solution implementation on ASP.NET to seamlessly integrate with two CRM systems. Excel spreadsheets with the latest information on new products and prices were exported from CRMs and then stored on Dropbox. For each branch, the client required a separate web solution tailored to differences in product catalogs, currency, prices, staff etc. Each web solution was to have access to its folder on Dropbox to import and update product catalogs and prices.

Solution

The AIS team suggested NopCommerce, a popular open-source shopping cart on Microsoft technologies, as a base out-of-the-box solution. NopCommerce fit the tech stack requirements and allowed customization and necessary functionality add-ons as per the client’s requirements. It also helped speed up the time to market — we delivered a portal multisite solution to the client after 2 months.

A few of the key solution highlights are:

Integration with Dropbox to enable data sourcing.
Setup of shared folders with discretionary access to import new data.
Several custom plugins and widgets to extend NopCommerce functionality.

AIS Team

2Developers

Customer location: London, UK

Project duration: 1+ year

Languages

JavaScriptHTML5CSS3ASP.NET

Services

Web Development UX/UI DesignBack-end Development

Technologies

nopCommerce

Frameworks

jQuery

Industry

Retail & Ecommerce

Miscellaneous

Microsoft SQL ServerDropbox APIExcelUptimeRobot

Results

The client received a set of full-fledged eCommerce solutions to support their sales and marketing efforts in the new Asian markets. The web apps allow wholesale and retail order placement with PayPal and banking card payment options. Implemented filtering system allows product search by price, grape, wine type, producer, alcohol content, country, and region. Additionally, the end client can buy a gift box and add a message to send the selected product as a nicely packed present to a friend.

To ensure easier maintenance, we developed a set of test scenarios and supporting mechanisms, as well as several guides, including the one for code merge. After the deployment, the project successfully entered the support and maintenance phase.