Business to Business Website

The Requirements

A very fast growing national company that sells computers, peripherals and supplies as well as audio-visual products needed to implement a B2B e-commerce web site to sell to new and existing customers.  

The web site needed to...

• Be personalized for each customer. In fact, the web site had to provide a different shopping experience to different divisions within a single customer organization. 

• Support pricing that allowed any one if its 40,000 items to be individually priced for each customer following complex pricing rules.

• Allow employees of large national customers to be able to register themselves to shop online while being subject to a number of shopper constraints (e.g. purchasing limits) imposed by the home office.

• Provide multiple sets of frequently-purchased items for each customer. Individual shoppers could then select the set to appear when they logged on.

• Support customer customized configurations of computer systems such as laptops and desktops. For example, customers needed to be able to specify a several standard desktop computer configurations that the shopper could then modify.

• Provide side-by-side comparisons of product features of particular products selected by a shopper. 

• Support follow-on configurations for a purchase such as specifying particular software and settings to be put on a laptop before delivery.

• Allow purchases either through an established customer's company on a Purchase Order or with a credit card.

The Solution

Working with the client's marketing staff, MindCrafted Systems developed the web site and had a version of it in place for a national sales meeting where it was received with acclaim. Today this web site is up and running.  As the client made acquisitions, new types of products have been easily integrated into the site.

Technology, Tools and Innovations

We used Rational Rose for the analysis and design of this database and its objects, FrontPage to lay out the web pages as well as Microsoft Site Server Commerce Edition, SQL Server and Active Server Pages to develop the web site. 

We used our own proprietary code generator to generate the code for the objects used in Visual Basic and in  Access. We used Visual Basic to create an ActiveX component for database access from the web site and also to enforce business rules. This ActiveX component was invoked from Active Server Pages. 

For "back office" users, we developed a Microsoft Access application to maintain products, customers, pricing and shoppers in the database. This database maintenance supported individual customer's look and feel plus pricing within the system. This database had 100+ tables and there are over 100 ASP pages in the web site.