Databases
Put Your Data to Work
I can almost guarantee that we can convert any database you give us into a format that can be translated into another system, application, or integrated with your website. We developed our in-depth knowledge working on our largest and most expensive website project to date. It was the biggest E-commerce project we ever took on, requiring us to manage almost 10,000 products.
The project was for a large wholesale shipping supply business that had a website since 2000, but they were unable to conduct business online. The site consisted of nothing more than images of the kinds of products they sold and a form that read, “Request our catalog here”. During my research preparing a proposal I filled out the form. I never did receive a catalog.
Luckily for them our patience and market intelligence runs deep, because they had a huge learning curve to even begin to transition their business online. However, the largest obstacle in their way to achieving online success was their vendor. The very supplier whose products they were selling would not give them the database of products and product information we needed to setup the shopping cart and website. It gets better. The supplier was willing to “sell” them a website that had all the products and information, BUT would not allow them to conduct secure e-commerce transactions directly from the site. Their customers could look, but if they wanted to purchase products they needed to pick up the phone or fax in an order. Without the database of product information our e-commerce solution would be worthless.
Our client would not have any control over the website their supplier wanted to “sell” them. They could not add landing pages for a PPC campaign, change the metadata for SEO purposes, or alter any of the core components of the site. It was merely a template with our client’s logo! This is not good for business, because without control over the site you cannot try new approaches to getting web traffic from the search engines.
They told us, “Do whatever it takes to sell these products online.” Guess what had to be done? Manually copy and paste all of the information from the supplier’s website to our client’s site and build the database from scratch. It was ironic. There was a file somewhere that had all the information we needed to allow our client to sell the supplier’s products through the web, but we had to gather all the product information by hand, download the pictures and rebuild the database because the supplier would not share the product information for “security reasons”. It was a portrait of absurd bureaucracy and ignorance. Do you think that stopped us?
Once we got all this information into the database, a few problems arose because our client failed to mention they needed a freight estimator to calculate what it would cost to send the products to different parts of the country. We revised the database several times before it was completed and in the process we learned the many intricacies of database development. This has paid off big for many of our clients who needed to translate existing data to valuable online content.