Online Stores

  • How do you make a great online store?

    We've had such a great success lately with our online store software. Our decision to build our own software from the ground up instead of just buying off the shelf has proved to work hugely in our favour. What's interesting is the angle we took when developing our software. We focused not only on the store customer's user experience but also the our client's experience for managing their store.

  • Ballygarvanstonecraft.ie gets closer to release and reddybrek.com gets twitter feed plug in

    I have updated my blog with a simple feed showing the latest entries on my Twitter feed. There's also a simple 'Follow Me' link so feel free to add me to get all the latest....er....random thoughts from my head! I would like to update the design used on my site but I haven't the time lately and the current BlogEngine ones are so boring (apart from this one obviously!). If anyone knows where to get new Blog Engine designs please let me know.

  • Ballygarvanstonecraft.ie launching soon using the new Dragnet Online Store Software

    Ballygarvan stone craft online store

    We are currently working on another new online store for a well established (30 years!) local company called Ballgarvan Stone Craft. Ballygarvan Stonecraft and Paving Company have been at the forefront in the production and development of a diverse range of innovative landscaping products and associated services.

    They were very interested in setting up a new online store for their customers and wholesalers to purchase through and were mighty impressed by our online store software and how suitable it can be for their needs. We are customizing a brand new store template for them and also throwing in some cool features like a garden estimating tool where people can get a rough price on how much it will cost them to get their garden work done.

    We have helped the client collect their product images and in the process of building the store to their exact needs now. We're looking to launch the site for mid month so I will blog again once this goes live.

  • BlueHavenStore.com Online Store launches in time for June Bank Holiday Weekend

    Blue haven store

    We have just launched another online store using our 'super amazing online store software ®' for The Blue Haven Group based in Kinsale, Cork. This version of our store uses our colour picker and sizing tools so that customers can order clothing as well as food hampers and other Blue Haven branded merchandise.

    As part of our services to help get the Blue Haven Store up and running we helped the client with product images and product entry so that they would be ready to launch for the bank holiday weekend. So if you'd like to grab a piece of Kinsale for someone you know, or even if you'd like to keep it for yourself, head on over to bluehavenstore.com and check out what's for sale.

  • Dragnet Systems Online store software gets an upgrade and EasyHouseExchange.com gets some new features too!

    At Dragnet Systems we're busy working away on the next instalment of our excellent online store software for businesses. We have added some new features to the basic store package that make it a very desirable piece of software to help any business make an impact selling products online!

    We're also readying a new site update for EasyHouseExchange.com which will let customers know what new properties within their chosen swap locations have been uploaded into the site.

  • Solgar.ie goes live with Dragnet Systems New Online Store Software

    Solgar.ie launches

    Dragnet Systems Limited is proud to launch its new flagship online store software. Our software has a number of benefits to businesses:

    • No nonsense, simple to use interfaces for your customers and your site admin team.
    • Excellent reporting tools showing you what products were sold in any timeframe you choose, view all sales for the last 30 days, view all sales for the last year, etc.
    • Reminder emails automatically sent to customers. Useful technique to get your customers to return to your site.
    • Promotions tools giving you the flexibility to offer your customers discounts.
    • Auto image resizing for product images uploaded. you don't need to worry about resizing your images, our software will manage it all.
    • SEO friendly page links. Site fully optimized for Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc.
    • Email Marketing. Your customers can easily sign up, and opt out of email marketing on the site. You have total control over the email's sent to your customers. Includes filters to effectively targeting the right people.
    • Site optimized for speed. Sites load insanely fast and fully tested with over 100,000 products and orders in the system - it's fully robust!
    • And much much more!

    If you think you might be interested in taking our store software for a spin simply contact Dragnet Systems today and see how this software could help your online business succeed.

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    This ends my shameless plug ;) Sorry about that, I'm just very excited about this new product!

  • Solgar.ie gets ready for launch

    solgar.ie website

    I've been very busy the last few weeks working on a new store for Here's Health in Patrick's street, Cork. This new store has given me a great opportunity to work on some new and interesting technology that I've been itching to try out.

    The site should be launching by the end of the week all going well. Here's a quick overview of some of the nice tech I managed to implement:

    • Extension-less URL rewritting - the store uses SEO friendly URLs for its pages so instead of calling products?ProductID=XX we can call the page using something more meaningful like products/department-name/product-name
    • PayPal XML integration - This is the last item I am working on at the moment. I'm setting up the site to use PayPal's SOAP XML integration for a 'seamless' paypal integration system. We get the benefit of letting PayPal handle the payments but we can use our own styling.
    • A brand new store edit tool that gives you full control over all aspects of your store. Full control to add in new departments, new sub departments, new products, featured products, most popular products, and much much more! It's all extremely easy and visually a delight to use. We've spent countless hours tweaking usability for the store and there are many powerful options for reporting including export to excel options, powerful site search options to find products or orders, quickly see at a glance how many orders you have pending,  or how many orders you have completed. We have over 8yrs experience with online stores so I think we have a very good idea of the types of things you will need for your store ;)
    • ASP.NET Charting Controls - Sticking with our site admin tool for a moment, our dashboard panel is full of cool and interesting charts - view the last 30 days of orders, the last 12 months of orders, your stores top 10 items sold on the site, etc.
    • Website Optimization - I have spent as much time as possible to ensure that our system is as streamlined as possible. We use ajax.net calls properly and help cut down on the traffic sent to and from our server. A cold page call, i.e. the first time your on the site takes only 3.5 seconds to load the site. If you return to the site you should see the web page almost instantly - roughly 0.4 secs. I must setup GZIP on the server yet so that should help speed things up for end users too. We have also tested the system with 100,000 products and 100,000 orders in the database and this has almost 0% impact on pulling the data to display to the user on the front of the website.
    • Website security - I have setup proper database encryption on sensitive user data and locked down database access permission. Both server side and client side validation is on all textbox entries on the site and we also ensure that all textboxes are html encoded before the data within it is used.

    All in all, I'm really excited about the new store software we have built up here. We have had a number of recent enquiries from people who are looking at getting something similar setup for their own shops so we might be onto a winner with this one (hopefully). We have also laid out a full development road map of features we will be adding in to this software over the coming months. I'll be blogging about some of these features and how you can implement them into your own sites over the next few weeks so stick around!

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