Penwizard.co.uk case study

Penwizard.co.uk is an online retailer of personalised products including children’s books, photo calendars, gifts event and corporate greetings cards. They required a website solution for order data capture and payment however the complex nature of their business demanded an innovative technological solution.

The challenge

To provide a solution that would support a higher purchasing volume over the internet and a rapidly increasing product range. In order to achieve this, a number of challenges needed to be overcome:

• Merge a number of leading edge technologies to a high specification over a short period of time.
• Integrate back office systems with on- and off-line sources.
• Link IT systems with the requirements.
• Analyse sales and marketing data from electronic and hard copy sources.
• Train existing and new staff on all IT systems.

The solution

The website was designed to consist of a shop front where users can browse, personalise and purchase products added to a back end where Penwizard can maintain their data and download the variable data for short run printing.

The key principles were:

• Development of a flexible website allowing product life cycle management and the addition of new products. The website was developed in Perl, JavaScript, Flash, DHTML and HTML and uses a MySQL database.
• Provision of a database solution capturing customer requirements, orders and payment. Worldpay was chosen to provide secure payment facilities that could be quickly and seamlessly accessed.
• Design of a tracking application for use at the printers to track the status of orders through print and despatch. This application was developed in VB.NET and uses barcodes to track orders.
• Implementation of templates to allow variable data to be easily and efficiently input and manipulated for a short print run.
• Integration with partner websites by use of Penwizard white label web pages.

The benefits

The successful implementation of the website solution within demanding timescales has given significant benefits to the customer:

• Sales increase of both new and existing product ranges.
• Controlled purchase and ordering processes.
• Accurate data analysis and management information.
• Low cost base.
• Fully trained team.