Our had fun with this one. This database driven ecommerce website sells kosher chocolates online. Everyone loves chocolates but the problem is that if they melt during shipping then nobody is going to be happy. We coustomized the shopping cart to allow an option for local delivery. Most third party shopping carts that people try to incorporate cheaply into a website may allow this but then each item you add to the cart will have that local del every cost added on again. We are professional ecommerce shopping cart programmers so this was not a problem for us. If you buy products and want them sent to one local address then there will be only one local delivery charge no matter how many items you buy.
Another situation came up in which it was determined that this ecommerce website will often be used by people giving a gift. If it is during a holiday then you might want to give gifts to several people. Believe it or not most ecommerce websites that you'll find almost seem to punish you for buying more than one gift going to more than one location. Try it elsewhere and you'll see that most websites will make you ship everything to one address. Your only other option would be to buy an item ship it to one address enter all your credit card info, leave the site then come back and order a gift for the next person and start from the beginning. We realized that this would be a bad customer experience so we set it up so that you could order some items for local delivery, some could go to another address and others could go to another address. You never check out and pay until you have finished buying all of the gifts you wanted to buy and then you check out just once and enter your credit card info at that time. It seems obvious now that we've explained the problem and you'd think every ecommerce website should work like the one we made for this South Florida chocolatier but most don't work as elegantly as ours. |
