Mountain Monograms Company Store

Background

Mountain Monograms is Southern Oregon's premier full-service embroidery company providing high-quality, digitized embroidery for businesses, teams, and many other organizations and individuals.

Mountain Monograms wanted to try offering a web-based storefront to a select few of their embroidery clients.  These storefronts would make ordering, and reordering, a simple process for these clients once they had settled on a select number of items from Mountain Monograms' extensive product offering.  The storefront was something new for  Mountain Monograms so a small investment was desired. 

The initial solution was a quick-and-dirty, xml-based system that provided basic product listings all on a single page and utilized AJAX to add items to the customer's shopping cart.  The resulting site essentially had 3 pages; the product list, the cart/checkout page, and a thank you page.  Orders were sent to Mountain Monograms via email and there was no database backend.

This solution worked for the most part.  Mountain Monograms setup 4 storefronts for testing with their clients.  The stores were easy to use for customers but were a maintenance and enhancement nightmare for Mountain Monograms. 

Because the product list for each store was an XML file, whenever they changed the product selections (seasonally), the overhead of making all of those manual changes to static XML files was too much.  There was also the added headache of having no "paper trail" if an order managed to fail to be delivered to Mountain Monograms email inbox.  Something else had to be done.

Getting Started

The initial conversations with Mountain Monograms included talk of a database-backed fully-functional commerce system but at the time the demand or utility of such a system was unknown.  Now that the concept had proven worth pursuing it made sense to talk again about a more robust system.

Being aware of the cost concern of such a large system and seeing the potential of a system that supports multiple front-end stores with a single unified backend, we proposed to build such a system for Mountain Monograms with no up-front cost.  This is HIGHLY unusual for us and for most businesses but we believed the concept had merit beyond the usage Mountain Monograms would have from it.

Let's Build It!

Working closely with Jason Cave of Ridgeline Media, we went to work defining the functionality of the system and designing the many backend screens that would be needed.

Our main goal was to build a system that would manage multiple front-end stores, each with it's own unique design, product inventory, orders, and customers.  All of the data across any number of stores would be unified in a single database and reports generated for the combined data.

Utilizing Ruby on Rails as our development platform allowed us to make quick progress on the system and iterate quickly through the many features we wanted the system to have.

The Result

A few short months after starting the project we had developed CompanyStorez Commerce, a platform that is the realization of our goal to have a single system unifying multiple storefronts.  This system is absolutely perfect for manufacturers who want to give their customers a web-based supply or re-supply channel, as well as those companies that are franchises or chains that need to supply multiple locations.

CompanyStorez Commerce allows for unlimited products, with unlimited options per product.  Mountain Monograms uses options such as Color, Size, and Thread Color.  They can also set a surcharge on those options, if needed, such as in cases of very large garments that cost them more to stock.  They're also using real-time credit card processing to process their orders as well as a "branch charge" option that we built in so that they can just invoice a customer's branch.  The absolute best thing about the system is that they can manage it all themselves without the overhead of XML files and laborius manual changes to the system. 

Mountain Monograms is just starting to realize the potential that CompanyStorez Commerce has within their business.  They've already setup several stores that get customer orders every day.  They are continually pursuing opportunities to use the CompanyStorez Commerce system with their customers.

The old product list screen

The new product list screen

CompanyStorez Product List Admin Screen

CompanyStorez Product Detail Admin Screen