Sandman is the largest wholesaler of consumer electronics in Estonia. Although the company already had an webshop for wholesale to other companies, it no longer met new business needs. Sandman turned to Uptime to create a simple and practical business-to-business e-shop that would be convenient for wholesale customers to use.
As a business environment, it also resulted in a practical design, but at the same time it was necessary to take into account several special requirements for the e-shop for wholesale clients.
The design of the new e-shop user interface already existed. Along with the design, it also came with some HTML to be able to implement with the technical side.
Uptime created the front end solution using Vue and Typescript. Existing design was emerged during the project and further designed by Uptime.
The platform-based e-shop was not satisfactory
The e-shop solution has been specially developed for Sandman business needs. Because the wholesale platform has a lot of business complexity, it seemed more sensible to make a special solution from start to finish, rather than trying to push business needs into a boxed product or ready-made platform.
Sandman also had previous experiences with his e-shop, so the customer knew exactly what they needed and the platform-based solutions did not meet exactly the needs.
The e-shop communicates with business software and product management system
Sandman’s B2B e-shop needs an interface with business software and communicates with the product management system, where all the information necessary for the e-shop about products, customers and orders is requested. In addition, the B2B solution is integrated with smaller services – for example, sending e-mails, calculating delivery methods, etc.
The five biggest challenges
As it was a special solution, it was also necessary to solve some tasks that may not arise in standard solutions.
Uptime had five major challenges:
- Wholesale has a very complex pricing logic. One of the most difficult tasks was to display the correct price for each product and to filter or sort out by that price.
- Initially, performance was a problem when building dynamic filters in the e-shop, but soon a solution was implemented, as a result of which the search is fast even when adding filters.
- The e-shop has many different views, where wholesale customers have a lot of entries, which is why paging is used in different views. Since each view has a different logic, it was necessary to find a paging system that would fit the logic.
- The product tree of the e-store is large and sometimes has up to five levels. This requires both a good user interface and a clever front-end solution to display the product tree and products quickly and correctly under it.
- Sandman’s business needs in defining user roles and rights are very detailed. It was a challenge for the analyst to work with Sandman to understand the necessary B2B rights and to assist the developers to show the information according to the very specific rights of the users.
Technologies used
The front end of the project is written in Vue and Typescript, and the Webpack tool was also used in the development. The Bootstrap framework was used for the styles. The back end is written in .NET.
Customer opinion
“We were very satisfied with both the cooperation and the result, and we dare to recommend Uptime as a development partner for other companies as well,” commented Ago Henry Altjõe, Sandman’s project manager.
Product category view. (Click on images to view full size)
Product detail view.
Ordering view.
