195032 Internet printing site

OVERVIEW [login to view URL] is the online business of Eveready Printing, of Cleveland, OH. The purpose of the Web site is to sell business cards, brochures, flyers, and other custom printed items. The Web site is hosted on servers owned by Maserati Concepts. The site is programmed using the PHP scripting language, and is supported by a MySQL database. The PHP code utilizes the Smarty templating system. The site was built primarily by customizing an (unidentified) shopping cart application. The home page consists mainly of Flash objects for navigation. The other pages of the site are dynamically generated using content stored in the database, and utilize a Flash toolbar for navigation. Customers place items in a “shopping cart” and then use a checkout process to purchase the items. Customers create an account with an ID and a password. The customer can log in to the account to see order history or to make changes to the customer's information. Payment through the Web site is handed off to a third-party credit card processor (PayPal Website Payments Pro). The site provides the ability for customers to upload artwork that is required to fulfill the orders. A back-end application is provided which gives the ability to manage customer orders and maintain products, product options, and product categories. The hosting company provides a control panel to allow administration of the Web site environment and database. A related Web site is [login to view URL], which is an informational Web site describing the services of Eveready Printing. This site is hosted on a server owned by Eveready Printing. Email services are also hosted on the server. The Web site consists primarily of hard-coded html. The home page contains Flash objects which are used for navigation, and a Flash object is used on the other pages for navigation. A number of issues with the existing [login to view URL] Web site have been identified. In addition, the requirements for a series of desired enhancements have been defined, which will allow the Web site to better serve customers in the future. GOALS The goal is to resolve the issues which have been identified, and implement the desired enhancements. More broadly, the current goals are: 1. Make the site easier to use and more user-friendly. Ensure that the process of ordering products conforms with the de-facto Web standards established by major e-commerceWeb sites. Make it easy for customers to find the products they want and place an order, including specifying product options. 2. Optimize the Web site for search engines. Reduce or eliminate the use of technologies such as Flash which hold content that cannot be indexed. This will also increase the usability of the site across all browsers, including mobile devices. 3. Provide the ability for self-administration. Make sure that the Web site can be updated with new products and categories of products without requiring a programmer to make changes to the site. Also add the ability to maintain the content on informational pages of the site such as links and testimonials. 4. Resolve business and technical issues. Several issues have been identified that need to be resolved. Some are technical issues with the site; others are business application issues that require the business logic of the site to be enhanced. The speed and reliability of the site need to be improved. ISSUES AND REQUIREMENTS The following issues and enhancements have been identified: 1. Improve the speed and reliability of the Web site. The site will be moved to GoDaddy Web Hosting. This should improve up-time and performance. The current hosting company alleges that the performance issues are due to the site programming. The move to a new Web host will help determine if this is truly the case. A GoDaddy Hosting Plan has been purchased. 3. Provide the ability to classify customers as taxable or non-taxable, and process their payments accordingly. Currently all customers are treated as taxable, and a workaround is being used to back out the tax for non-taxable customers. The fix, which involves the use of discount coupons for the amount of the tax, causes confusion for the customer. The customer should be able to specify their own tax status when creating an account, with the ability for an administrator to update this information on the customer's account. 5. Provide the ability to enter and process phone orders. This is partly a usability issue, where improving the user-friendliness of the site could reduce the need to enter orders on behalf of customers, but there will likely always be some customers who want to place their order by phone or email and those orders need to get into the system. This is handled by using the online site to enter the order as if it were being entered by the customer. The issue occurs when processing the credit card transaction. PayPal does not allow a store owner to enter the customer's credit card information using the normal process. Instead, the credit card data must be entered using PayPal Virtual Terminal, which results in duplicate data entry. In addition, to prevent the order from being processed through PayPal Website Payment Pro, a coupon for a 100% discount of the price is entered. This causes the order to not properly reflect the actual breakdown of the charges incurred (product vs. shipping vs. handling vs. tax), which creates additional accounting labor. (The pricing details are typed into the order comments.) 6. Provide the ability to download data to QuickBooks. Need to define which data is required in QuickBooks, and obtain interface specifications. Probably customers, orders, and payments. (Need to resolve issue #5 above, because the data for those orders is contained in the order comments.) 7. Provide the ability to download data to the UPS World Ship system. Need to define the content of the interface. Specifications are probably available from UPS, and would include order shipping information. 8. Add additional informational pages to the Web site and provide the ability to maintain the content of these pages. The new pages will include: a. Links b. Testimonials c. FAQ (already have this page, but can't maintain it) 9. Provide the ability to maintain the content (text and images) on the home page. Content sections would include information about the company and products, featured products, and special offers or sales. This text can be optimized for indexing by search engines. 11. Provide the ability to ship an order to multiple addresses. Need to define how the user interface will work, to be able to specify which items go to which address. 12. Provide the ability to handle shipping charges for multiple boxed items that are shipped in a single carton. For example, there is a shipping charge to ship one box of business cards. If two boxes of cards are ordered, both boxes are placed in a single carton. Currently the system still charges to ship two boxes, when really it needs to calculate shipping charges for one carton. Probably need to be able to specify the maximum number of boxes that can be packed per one shipping carton, and then calculate the number of cartons to be shipped for the order. 13. Add a “How did you hear about us” option. Collect this information during the checkout process when creating the customer account. 14. Provide the ability for customers to choose stock photos for their orders. WePrintQuick has access to stock photos that can be used for printing jobs. The photos are licensed for royalty-free use, but cannot be resold. Want to allow customers to browse and select photos, without giving access to hi-res versions of the photos. Add design tool like Vista Print. 15. Add online realtime PDF proofing 16. Fix the Options functionality and improve the process of ordering a product. The site administrator has the ability to configure options that can be assigned to a product. The customer can choose from among these options when entering an order. Some of this functionality is broken, resulting in a work-around solution where new products are created that are really just variations of an existing product. As an example, look at how some other sites use options during the ordering process. For example [login to view URL], [login to view URL], and jakprints.com. Note that as options are selected, the displayed price changes. 17. Provide the ability to upload templates for new products. The administrator has the ability to upload images for use on the site. Would like the ability to upload templates in the same manner. 18. Provide the ability to generate new content pages. These pages would be useful as landing pages for advertising promotions. If you run an advertising campaign it is better to have the customer arrive on a page specific to that promotion instead of having them arrive at the home page and then have them try to find the advertised product.