Case Studies
Foy and Company
Challenge
Foy and Company, are a leading department store in the Northwest of Ireland, selling
quality and stylish furniture, fabric, kitchenware, paint, and lighting. In 2008,
the company contracted Presto Web Design to build a catalogue web site, with a view
to offer a wedding gift list facility, and online shopping, at some time in the
future. The design of the web site was provided by their existing corporate design
team, therefore, the web site needed to be built to integrate with the designer's
specifications. Phase I of the project went live in September 2008.
In 2009, coinciding with a reorganisation of their business, Foy and Company, proceeded
to phase II, with the addition of a wedding gift list facility. Key objectives were:
- Ease of use for wedding couples, wedding guests and store staff alike
- Wedding guests may securely purchase one or more gifts online, or at the counter
in all Foy and Company stores
- Purchases from the wedding list to be automatically updated, allowing wedding couples
to log in and view their list in real-time
Solution
Although an online wedding list may seem to be just another form of an online shopping
site, it introduces many challenges. Firstly, there is a finite number of products
in the list. A large store may have hundreds of toasters in stock, but there will
only be one toaster in the wedding list. When one wedding guest places a gift in
their shopping cart, that gift must be instantly unavailable to the other wedding
guests in that wedding list. Secondly, some wedding guests might chose to make a
purchase from the wedding list in one of the three stores. Therefore, a mechanism
for making purchases in-store which instantly update the wedding list is needed.
Thirdly, when a wedding guest makes a gift purchase, the name of the guest(s) and
a short message needs to be attached to the purchase.
PayPal was chosen as the
payment gateway for the site. PayPal is a globally accepted payment system that
enables a business to collect payments from customers in most popular currencies.
Although PayPal is a non-seamless method of accepting payments, that is, the purchasing
customer is redirected to a 3rd party website, PayPal offers the following advantages:
- PayPal is a well respected method of payment, accepting major credit and debit cards
as well as their own payment system.
- PayPal is extremely affordable, with no monthly, set-up, or cancellation fees, thus
avoiding the necessity of passing transaction charges onto customers
- PayPal provides instant
PCI Compliance - customers pay on secure PayPal pages, and PayPal take care
of the complexity of storing and handling sensitive payment data.
Benefits
Phase II went live in December 2009.
