November, 2010

November 2010—Selling online is increasingly important even to our business-to-business customers, and this month we completed two major e-commerce projects for clients.

For International Poster Gallery, a brick-and-mortar gallery on Boston’s prestigious Newbury Street, selling its world-class collection of poster art is just as important online as it is in the store. With many of its customers overseas, Internet commerce is the only way to reach them. While IPG already had a basic shopping cart set up on its site when it first engaged with Radar, the cart was limited to PayPal sales only. The cart worked, but forced customers to have a PayPal account in order to do business and provided no linkages back to IPG’s wish list or other functions. The new Radar cart replaced the old shopping function with a new credit-card payment system that works all over the world. It includes customized shipping logic that automatically calculates shipping costs based on shipping location, quantity and size of shipping frames. Equally important, customers can now save favorite posters in their wish lists, and then move the items to their shopping cart at any time.

The second e-commerce project was for long-time Radar client, Covaris, Inc.

Here again, Covaris already had an existing shopping cart, but certain functions were limited. Covaris wanted its customers, for example, to be able to easily find scientific supplies by not just looking up product categories as before, but to be able to search on names, part numbers and descriptions. Being able to accurately calculate sales in states where the tax amount varies by city and town, like California and Illinois, was also critical.The new Radar store not only provides all this functionality, but the redesigned cart also displays well on mobile devices such as smartphones and Apple iPads.