A New Ecommerce Website for Flow Massage Wax
We’ve just completed a new website for Flow Massage Wax. As online business was increasing for our client, she decided it was time to re-brand and offer both herself and her clients an improved shopping cart experience.
The original Massage Wax website
For some years, the client’s needs had been met with a simple drop down list and some manually included Paypal buttons. This was adequate, but manually intensive to change things. Shipping was handled by price inclusiveness. This was also adequate, but limiting as far as selling products of varying shapes and sizes.
A new ecommerce website with updated technologies
The new website was built using WordPress and an integration of WooCommerce, a well supported shopping cart experience that provides an intuitive user interface for both customers and the website owner.
Shipping and the NZ Post Api
Shipping has long been one of the most complex things to work out with E-Commerce websites. How to work out (on the fly) the postage for items of varied sizes and weights being posted to locations anywhere in the world? Not easily and it was rarely the case that a website owner could configure a cart’s shipping methods confidently without having to ask a website savvy person to assist.
The new cart at Flow Massage Wax communicates directly with NZ Post online servers to work out shipping costs on the fly. For this system to work, all our client needed to do was enter in the weights and dimensions of a product and the dimensions of imagined box sizes to hold various combinations of products. With those figures in place, and then sent to NZ Post at the time of purchase, shipping rates are returned that are almost identical to what you would get by taking your goods to the Post Office and doing it manually.
Integration with a payment gateway
There are many payment gateways out there and every good shopping cart allows for easeful integration with a gateway to allow a shopper to pay for their products. Our Flow Massage Wax client was already using PayPal, so she opted to continue with this gateway that she already understood. WooCommerce allowed for an easy integration with PayPal and the client is once again receiving payments from customers via that gateway.
WordPress and WooCommerce
Both these platforms are being constantly improved and updated and do not charge for updates. Like many web developers, we customise WordPress to suit a client’s individual needs. When doing this we take great care to ensure that future updates will not affect any of our carefully implemented modifications and customisations. For our client Flow Massage Wax this ensures that her website software can be updated over time and keep up with current security needs and software improvements. For a small fee, we oversee this process to ensure trouble free updates. The end result is a website that persists longer over time before needing any major upgrades.
A responsive website for smart phones and mobile devices
Finally, Flow Massage Wax is a “Responsive” website. This means that the ever increasing users of smart phones will be able to use these devices to order and pay for their massage wax and other massage related products. A new shopping cart that is not built with responsive design is simply out of date the moment it goes live. With smart phone users unable to shop easefully on the the website, a large portion of potential customers would not be served.
With all of the above in place, we are looking forward to supporting our client expand her customer base to further overseas and domestically in NZ.