Bike Inventory App Development

Technology Stack

Unity3d Game Engine
C#
PHP-Mysql

The Challenge

The client is a single bike store that handles two websites.

Wollongongbikehub.com.au and Albionparkrailbikehub.com.au. The stores sell the same products and have the same layout. The only difference between both stores is the whether a given product is in stock. Both websites are handled from a Magento backend. Products come from one Point of Sale- Towersystems.com.au. So customers need to be able to easily access the inventory, check to see what is in stock, and be directed from one page to another to quickly select their products.

But the main problem was that, Towersystems’s module was generic for default Magento. It did not support multi-store application. So products coming from POS were assigned only to one website, not both.

The Solution

Everything goes through the POS system and through Magento and some customized modules. So products come from Towersystems.com.au to Magento, and Magento splits the products between two stores.

We have customized tower system’s solution in such a way that the product coming from POS is now showing in both stores properly.

The system is setup so that even if one site doesn’t have a certain item in stock, the customer is quickly redirected to the item selection for the other site. The customer is kept aware of the inventory status at all times; if something is out of stock at both sites, then it won’t show up. Further, we’ve included a “click and collect” option so that the customer can go to the store and pick up items that the seller might be unable to ship to their homes. The checkout process is easy and quick to avoid hassle.

Finally, we made several security updates, created custom modules, and fixed some problems that were causing performance issues.

Features

Expanded Inventory

Click on a product to go to the product layout page. The layout of each page is the same on each site.
The stores have different categories for product selection. If you select the “Adult Bikes” tab, you can see different bikes for both men and women. There is also a tab for childrens bikes, a tab for scooters, and so on.
On the product listing page, you can choose between a grid view or a list view. You can also browse by price, see your recently viewed products, and see the availability of each product.
Although a certain product might not be available in one store, it will be available in the other store. For example, a user at Albionparkrailbikehub.com.au might hover over a product and see a button that says “view details for availability”.
Entering the details page, there will be a clear message that the product is available from Wollongongbikehub.com.au. The customer wouldn’t click out of the site, but would instead follow the link to that website and you’ll be able to collect the product you want.
This way, even if a product is unavailable in a certain store, the customer will be able to order it from the other store.
If a product is not available within one store, there will be a clearly written message saying that the product is available in the next store, and if the product is unavailable in both stores, it will not display within either website. If product is available on both websites, it will be clearly written as available from both stores.

Options for Delivery or Pickup

In general, in an average ecommerce site, you’ll have the option to purchase by clicking on a button that says “add to cart” or something similar. The customer can add it the product the cart and check out and it’ll be shipped to customer. But that would be a problem for certain goods that ordinarily couldn’t be shipped, like a bike.
Some items in Albionparkrailbikehub.com.au and Wollongongbikehub.com.au, like scooters, can be easily shipped to the consumer. But Adult bikes make it difficult.
So instead of delivering right to the customer’s house, there’s the option to “Click and Collect.” By selecting this option, the product will be in the store and the customer can come and pick it up.
The difference is based on product type. For example, scooters will be shipped to the customer. But adult bikes will be in the store itself and the customer will have to visit store and pick it up.
There is no shipping cost for products, you go and collect at the store, but there will be shipping costs to products delivered to your home.

Easy Checkout

On the cart page, once you’ve selected your items, you can proceed to checkout.
You can checkout as a guest or login with a username, email, password, and address.
You can pay with a credit or debit card, or you can use Paypal. (If you don’t have a Paypal account, you have the option to create one).
At the general checkout, you can can see messages about your shipping charges. For example, if you have in-store pickup, your shipping charges will be zero.

Customizations and Back-End Handling

There have already been several updates, and more are in progress.
- Capital Numbers also added five security patches within the site.
- Third party module Towersystem POS code extended,
  - To support display of product in both store, it was showing only one one store before our work.
  - To support creation of configurable product, as requested by client. Though, this integration still in progress on client’s end.
- There was an issue where the product was disabled when it is out of stock, but didn’t get enabled again when gets in stock. We fixed that issue.
- We have created module to upload pdf per product.
- On the home page, there are several banners that can be handled from the back end. We created a new module created to manage banners in site, with multistore support.
- We made a fix that reduced the site’s CPU usage by optimising the product synchronization code, the stock/qty update code, and all cron jobs configured in server.
Hours of operation: The hours of operation are posted on the website, and the hours for each day can be handled individually from the back end.
Contacts page: We’ve edited maps (that shows the location of the store) on contacts page where users can get in touch.