Laboutiquededora.fr

Goals:

• Laboutiquededora.fr is a personal website that sells second-hand clothes and articles to French users. It, therefore, has to provide users with a “warm and simple yet welcoming experience” while at the same time present sophisticated functionality found in most professional e-boutiques.
• The site is managed by people who are not technically inclined and who do not have time to use a complex system. Therefore, it should be easy to administer.
• The website has to be in French.
• The site has to include very solid functionalities for the management of stock, checkout, orders, payments and Clients as if it were a “big store”.
• Very good response time.
• Users should be able to visualize details of each item.
• Ability to add new product categories without changing the initial design.

Approach:

We first installed Drupal and the initial Modules and then focused on the look when most front-office and back-office capabilities were ready to go. We developed a sub theme from Bartik to complete the task.

Front-office:

The site is similar to other sites of the same type. The front-office is very simple, it provides visitors with user friendly navigation with the ability to move from one article category to another (e.g. coats, jackets, sweaters, pants, t-shirts, shoes, books…).

Each article category is displayed in a table with pictures, a short description of the article, the trademark, its condition (as new, very good, good), a price and a stock quantity. The user can easily add an article to the cart and proceed to checkout in a very smooth way after having accepted the terms and conditions of the website. A contact form is also provided so that visitors can send their questions.

Each picture of an article can be zoomed to display greater detail, thanks to Drupal’s hover preview capability. A special popup window appears on mouse over to display the definition of an article’s condition.

Payment is through PayPal. The PayPal module works very well.

Back-office:

The back office is as complex as a “big e-commerce website” with everything you need from content to cart, orders, products, client profiles, tax, payment process and shipment status management.

Each product description can be entered using a WYSIWYG interface.

Automatic e-mails are sent to users upon order creation and each time an order process changes from pending to shipped.

We decided to implement Mollom thanks to its “intelligent” anti-spam screening capabilities in order to make it very easy for a user to send e-mail to the administrator of the site (without having to fill a CAPTCHA form).

Last not but least, each page of the site is SEO-optimized and Google Analytics can track the site.

Unfortunately, some of the terms of the Drupal Modules cannot be translated into French at this time. One example is “total order” or “shipping address”. We have hopes that these “hiccups” will be corrected, which will allow us to edit these entries in the future.

Conclusion:

Our overall experience has been very positive. Drupal 7 is a powerful solution for anyone looking for e-boutique capability. The Drupal community is a great help, always willing to lend a hand.