Frontier :: Jewelers Resource Web Development Case Study

Overview

Jewelers Resource is a Minneapolis based national jewelry who strives to offer the most up-to-date styles of diamond and karat gold jewelry at the best possible value. They are especially unique because they are a company who is not open to the public; they have agreements with large corporations to sell to owners of franchises within that corporation at substantial savings.

Jewelers Resource had an existing web site with e-commerce that was costing more money than it was making. Besides problems with design, the web site didn’t allow them to market their products as needed. We worked with Jewelers Resource to create a scalable, skinable, design that features the ability for direct marketing, end user promotions, product auctions, and more!

Challenges

The first challenge was design. Jewelers Resource main marketing efforts are traveling to trade shows and marketing directly to their customers. They publish printed catalogs on a regular basis that are specific to a trade show or to a specific customer. They needed their site to be able to change in design just as their catalogs did. We designed a skinable system that allows administrators at Jewelers Resource to change the entire look of their site in just a few clicks. Below are a few samples of some of the different looks they have used recently:

We used some nice Flash features such as 3D page flipping, product zooming, and sparkle tools to really make the design stand out.The next challenge was getting all their inventory online and designing a method that was easy to update. We were able to merge Jewelers Resource internal system which was a Microsoft product into our web database so that inventories would be updated and products put on and off the site based on their inventory status. This is known to be the favorite feature of the main administrator who manages this site.

We created the ability for custom client home pages to really focus on the specific niche markets of Jewelers Resource and gave customers unique purchasing options that allowed them to purchase via PO number as long as their company name could be verified.

Results:

Online sales and post trade show sales have increased dramatically. Web traffic is way up and the customer has been extremely happy with their site and the compliments they get from their customers.

Features on this site include:

Skin manager and custom home page design tool
Both Flash and HTML versions of the site
3D catalog simulation
Flash product zooming
Inventory synchronization with offline system
The ability to auction products
Custom shipping options
Advanced gift certificate and voucher ordering and redeeming process
Processing of online coupons and discount codes
Ability to send custom promotional e-mails
Advance searching and filtering of products
& More

For more visit this project in our portfolio, or www.jrcompany.com