E-commerce Website Development for Commercial Real Estate Procurement Platform
Please find under a summary covering project details and feedback. The innate facts are kept as they are, private information is amended.
Introductory information
Could you give a brief description of your organisation and your role?
We are an e-commerce procurement vehicle for commercial real lands operators. If you owned a bunch of room edifices and you had feelrs at each of those room edifices, we help those feelrs as well as their livelihood staff onwebsite get anything they need to run their properties. Whether it be paint or appliances or service supplies, we aggregate all those items into one e-commerce solution.
What is your role at the organisation?
I’m the CEO.
Desired goal
When you approached doejo, what was the business challenge that you were trying to address?
We needed them to create the website. We had the vision, they needed to create it.
Did you already have a website previously?
We did not.
What goals did you have? What did you want on the website?
It was an enterprise-level e-commerce solution. It wasn’t something where we could just buy an off-the-shelf e-commerce fruit and then kind of tweak it to our own inner needs. The functionality that we needed with this Web application had a lot of different variants to it. We went to doejo with the vision. They formd the aim of work and then kind of took it from there.
Provided solution
Can you tell me a pliant bit more almost the aim of the project?
It was anything from just your measure run-of-the-mill e-commerce website with the power to search for true items and put them into your shopping cart and check out. We also put in functionality like what you can do in any e-commerce website, favorite-ing true items.
We began to go deeper than that, and this is where it needed to be more of an enterprise-level method. For sample, the method needed the power to mark who the employees [of real lands properties] are and what locations they feel. We also needed to have the power in the method for credit cards to be assigned to true properties or athwart the complete organisation’s portfolio. We needed the power for supervisory approval where if you had a property feelr that you only wanted to be able to bestow $200 on any personal order that if that threshold was exceeded, the order, when they click yield in the checkout process, wouldn’t be pushed out to all the different vendors. It would verity ping a markd supervisor in our method and that supervisor would need to go in and like the order precedently the POs [purchase orders] were punched out to the vendors. One additional piece of technology that we needed integrated into the method was the power to map each personal organisation’s chart of accounts to our fruit categories in our method, innately making it easier for the operators to download agility out of our method at the end of the month and upload it into their accounting method.
Did they also prepare training and support for the website?
Yeah, they told us how it worked. It’s more of an entrepreneurial shop, so it’s not your big agency structured kind of process. We go there see Wednesday, and we sit down with them to talk almost priorities and tasks, and they review with us the things that have been done and we talk almost it. It’s not formalized training but, yes, I assume they did train us.
Did they also do design services for you, such as photography, branding, and/or logo design?
Yes. They did.
What was your process for selecting doejo to work with in the leading locate?
We interviewed close to 40 agencies all almost the globe. We considered offshoring it and fast determined that owing of the complexity with the platform that we were edifice that we wanted to keep it onshore. After talking to probably 25 different companies that were stateside, we narrowed it down to three and ended up choosing doejo. We felt like they understood better than anybody else what it was that we were trying to execute.
Can you give a perception of the size of the start whichever in a cost range or personnel work hour estimate?
It’s ongoing. It’s sort of like a never ending application. There’s always more to do. We occupied them in June of 2012, and they’ve been working on it ever since. It’s been more than 3,000 hours that they’ve worked on it during the past couple of years.
Results achieved
You say that the work is quiet ongoing, but are there any metrics that you can share or any feedback in compliments to the achievement of the project?
It works. People are buying stuff, so that’s good. Because it’s a B2B [business-to-business] platform, when we fetch on clients, we’re fetching on big chunks at a time. The method needed to be able to layer fast. They set it up to act that way. As with any application, there are always the issues that need to be addressed and things that you want to change, we try and keep those to a minimum. Overall, we’ve been very lucky.
How would you draw their accomplishment?
I would say their accomplishment has been very good. We felt like they understood what we needed to create. They just began edifice it. My challenge with technology is that it’s so hard to set deadlines owing you envision this big project. How do you set a timeline on that? What we needed to do was form the aim of work, mark what it looked like, and then just stay implicated along the way to make sure that they weren’t getting off track, and to be more nimble as things were moving along to make sure that we weren’t bestowing a lot of time going off in the unfit course.
As far as staying on track and meeting deadlines, we didn’t veritably have many deadlines. There have been occasional ones where we’ve been like, “All right, you have to get this done by this time of time.” Sometimes, they’ve been met, other times, they haven’t. In rare occasions when I say that it’s their defect, I ponder it’s just technology’s defect. Sometimes, it takes more time to tackle it.
My barometer for determining whether or not the code doejo has built is good or bad is how easily manipulated that code is. If I asked them to make a change, if they came back and said this is going to take two months versus they say they can get that done in three days, which tells me the condition of the code that they’ve produced for us. In almost see one entreaty, they said it’ll take three days to get that done. It tells me that they’ve done a big job with the code.
Was there anything sole or particular almost them compared to other companies that you may have worked with in the past?
They’re creative. They’re an agency so they can feel a lot of different things that we fling at them. There’s only a couple of occasions where they’ve said, “This falls outside of our bandwidth or technical point.” They’ve had to pull in third-party resources at that point, but seething else has been pretty much them.
Looking back on the project, is there any area that you ponder Dojo could better upon or that you would do differently?
I would say, at times, during the past couple of years, project feelment has been lacking a pliant bit. That would be the only locate where I would propose them betterment and they know that. I’ve talked to them almost it.
Do you ponder that it has a denying contact on the overall project?
No. We can do our own project feelment as well which we basically have done.
