GreenMachinery

GreenMachinery is a Midland Power Machinery Distributors (MPMD) dealer/retailer who approached Getme to build a website to sell their machinery and replacement spare parts for the gardening market.

The site acts as a low-maintenance online retailer, selling direct to consumers, and boasts many of the most powerful features of modern e-commerce websites.

GreenMachinery have worked with Getme and MPMD to produce an e-commerce solution that shares MPMD's product data in order to help GreenMachinery quickly and effectively populate their online catalogue.

GreenMachinery.co.uk uses Getme's Air framework to provide both a content management system and powerful e-commerce facility combined.

Effective design

Getme designed the site to be both visually pleasing and functionally purposeful.

The attractive visual quality of the design not only stands out from the other websites in this area of the market, it compares favourably with that of any online retailer, reassuring the visitor that they are dealing with a respectable business.

The clean, clear layout allows even first-time visitors to feel comfortable with the site, and quickly narrow down their product choice either by category menu or via a search.

It is worth noting that despite the multitude of intuitive interactive features such as 'mouse-over' drop-down menus and image zooming, no scripting or Flash is used, only (X)HTML and CSS. This means that pages load quickly, and all content can be categorised and accessed via search engine.

Getting straight to the point

GreenMachinery features a powerful self-building search facility.

This means that each time a search is performed, a range of options (specific to the term entered) are provided to allow further refinement of the search.

For example, if we enter 'buggy' into the search field, a variety of options are displayed in order to allow us to narrow the selection by Category, Make or Price:

Four options are displayed to allow the search to be refined by Category.

Four options are displayed to allow the search to be refined by Make.

Three options are displayed to allow the search to be refined by Price.

Note that in every case the number of products in each selectable area is shown in brackets after the area name, and no irrelevant information is displayed.

In the case of Price, the options are broken down into ranges which are calculated to precisely match those of the products available within.

Also available are options to:

• Search within the results that are currently displayed (Extended search)
• Show up to a specified number of products on screen at once
• Sort the results by Search rank, Make, or Price (high or low)

Effortless ordering

One of the key attributes to the success of major online retailers such as Amazon or Play is that they enable customers to save their address and payment card details when they first place an order.

Thereafter, any further orders can be made by simply signing-in, adding an item to the basket and confirming the desire to purchase with a few clicks.

The features that the Air framework's e-commerce module provide have allowed Getme to fully implement this facility into GreenMachinery.

This not only saves customers time and effort, but such simplicity can also result in an increased chance of orders being placed; a great benefit to the retailer.

Delivering quality

To ensure a high standard of customer experience from start to finish, when an order has been placed, the system automatically generates a print-quality PDF delivery note which is downloaded, printed and dispatched with the product to be delivered.

This is in-line with the practices of the biggest online retailers, and the professional delivery note provides the final reassurance to the customer that they have ordered from a company with impressive credentials, and one which cares for it's customers.

Under control

Another feature which provides a great deal of reassurance to customers is the presence of a stock level displayed for every product, allowing an order to be placed safe in the knowledge that the item in question is available to be dispatched at the earliest opportunity.

The stock control system incorporated into the e-commerce element of Getme's Air framework automatically updates a warehouse database to keep track of stock level for every product.

This allows website visitors to see what is available, and provides GreenMachinery an ideal way to keep track of when more stock should be ordered for any product.

Adding to the basket

A feature used by some of the biggest online retailers, but not often seen on websites in GreenMachinery's area of business, is related categories and products.

This means that for any item that a GreenMachinery visitor views, a list of related products will be shown below the item, along with other product categories which may be of interest.

Readily accessible

A popular feature of Google is Google Product Search (also known as Froogle), which allows users to search the web for any particular product, and returns results from a variety of online retailers.

GreenMachinery has been set up to automatically populate Google Product Search with it's entire catalogue, enabling a great many people to find the site simply by searching in that manner.

The Google Product Search feature to sort results by relevance, price, product rating or seller rating allows potential customers to view the strengths of GreenMachinery in direct comparison to the competition.

Conclusion

The most vital aspects of any e-commerce website are an appealing, intuitive and satisfying shopping experience for customers, and a low maintenance, efficient and effective back-end system to allow the business to quickly process orders and manage their stock.

The Air-based system Getme put in place for GreenMachinery covers all these important areas, and could even provide more if necessary - see our Air product page and feature chart for an impression of all the possibilities offered by this incredibly powerful and flexible web solution.