Element78: Web design and development agency in Bristol – Website design, development, hosting, SEO, email marketing and social networking: Case Study

Case Study:The Consortium

The Consortium are the largest independent supplier of education resources in the UK. For over 30 years, they have been providing schools and colleges with all the supplies and services needed to operate on a daily basis. Traditionally a catalogue detailing over 25,000 products has been the main means of marketing and selling to The Consortium's customers, but when they came to us in 2005 and asked for a complete redevelopment of their website we rose to the challenge of delivering a solution that would take their business into a new era.

When managing the details, prices, images and categories for over 25,000 products you don't want to have to do that twice! To ensure the online solution fitted in seamlessly with existing offline material we integrated the new website with Pindar's catalogue management software so any changes that were made to any products were immediately updated online. This included breakpoints and web or account specific discounts.

Screen shot of a product page on the The Consortium website

Having solved the problem of product management we then had to work on integrating the website with the back end order management and delivery tracking systems. The website had to not only place orders, but also check delivery availability and any restrictions on account spend limits. And all of this needed to be done instantaneously in order to provide a smooth and efficient experience for the customer. Due to the existing technologies within some of The Consortium's customer base we needed to integrate other order submission systems such as CXML punch out. All of this was achieved using web services and exposed APIs.

Since the website has gone live The Consortium have seen an unprecedented rise in the percentage of business now conducted online, customer feedback has been very positive and The Consortium have introduced new product specific websites that all use the backbone developed by Element78.

Visit the site
www.theconsortium.co.uk