About eRelyx
Founded in 2010, eRelyx is an online marketplace for authenticated, pre-owned luxury watches. They bring buyers and sellers together, in a fair, trusted, and hassle-free environment. eRelyx accepts high-end watches, confirms their legitimacy, and sells them on behalf of their owners for a fee.
Opportunity
PLAVEB was put in charge of developing an elegantly designed, and efficient custom ecommerce shopping cart application. The client wanted a design that reflected the inherent elegance of the watches for sale on their website. In addition to a stylish website design, the client also wanted a simple navigation process that helped clients buy and sell authentic, pre-owned watches with relative ease. eRelyx wanted a dynamic online platform that enabled its clients to search for pre-owned watches within specific parameters, sell watches, create user accounts, and make secure purchases. Another important requirement was the facilitation of interaction between eRelyx and its clients, through a discussion forum, the eRelyx blog, and comments posting.
Above all, the client required that the core concept of the website could be immediately visualized by looking at the homepage.
Challenges
- Minimizing the number of clicks required for a product purchase.
- Creating dynamic and exhaustive menu attributes, to help sellers clearly define their products, and ensure better sales results.
- Seamless integration of various sections such as eRelyx Blog, discussion forum, Hot Watches, and Celebrity Watches into a single page, designed to leverage celebrity and social buzz about watches, drive traffic, and generate interest.
- Enabling users to post comments about celebrities and their watches, to get their opinion on a celebrity watch.
- Enabling dynamic product insertion that is reflected on the home page slider, along with the requisite information.
- Custom shopping cart integration, to make shopping convenient and quick.
- Implementing advanced search functionality, through comprehensive search attributes that simplify searches, making the search process more accurate, and also helping users refine their search results.
- ‘Invite a Friend’ module integration, to help users invite their friends, and be rewarded with points that can be redeemed when they make a purchase, made possible through Plaxo third party API integration.
- Ensuring that the custom shopping cart design theme was similar to the client’s WordPress based blog.
Execution
We worked closely with the client to create a unique, elegant, and visually striking website layout. Our in-depth understanding of the client's requirements, and our ability to choose the right mix of technologies, led to the creation of an application that was extremely intuitive and highly efficient. The successful execution was an outcome of sustained efforts to tackle all project challenges, while ensuring that the application met the client’s directive, every step of the way.
Results
PLAVEB fulfilled its objective of creating a custom, state-of-the-art shopping cart system that was perfectly aligned with all requirements, and fulfilled eRelyx’s expectations. We developed a well-crafted, highly polished website that has a high degree of functionality. We also ensured that the website and applications adhered to the client’s specifications of simplicity, understated elegance, and efficiency. The design helped the products to stand out, while the functionality delivered a fulfilling user experience for the buyer and the seller.
Technical Details
The application was developed using LAMP Technology (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP). We also made use of Smarty, WordPress, JQuery, Plaxo Third Party API, HTML, CSS, PayPal payment gateway integration, and Ajax, to ensure that the project met with all client specifications. PLAVEB implemented an Error Notification System, that sends error messages directly to the developer, without needing to inform end-users. In addition, an SSL certificate was put in place, to ensure the security of all ecommerce transactions performed on the site.