Check it out… www.bearsmatter.com!

www.bearsmatter.com is officially online today! Go check it out!

Last week I spent about an hour and half implementing information I received from our client to put into the shopping cart. I had sent her a thorough list of the information I needed, and going back and forth through email I received most of what I needed. I didn’t get the shipping section done right away because we needed the weights of the products, so I emailed Warm Buddy for those. I fixed the purchase links on the store front as well because some products have multiple colours/styles, and there needs to be multiple purchase links for those products so that the client and customers know which colour of bear they are buying, for example.

Our client also didn’t have her PayPal working just yet, but I did have the ID of the account. So I did manage to do testing up to the point of payment to see what it looked like for a customer up until then. I also managed to do some testing before getting the PayPal ID (orders went through without payment) to see how the Order Notification emails and Customer Receipt emails would look.

Last Friday I also spent almost three more hours editing more articles that were transferred automatically into Joomla!. I actually found it harder because the paragraphs weren’t separated, and some of the articles had lots of code intertwined – tables or span tags, etc.

Today Reiko, Emma and I met up with our client and had a three hour meeting and we launched the site. Emma went over some of the basics of the site with our client and worked on getting Twitter and Facebook setup (which is almost worked out… we might be able to use the original Twitter and Facebook extensions I found as the Twitter one no longer costs money. However it is posting updates when a change is made to any page, not just the Blog; and the Facebook one isn’t cooperating as well. If these will not work, hopefully the Ping.FM extension will if we can get an API). During that I was doing some more editing in the Mal’s part of the store while showing Reiko what it looks like as she might be interested in using it for a website.

Then I showed our client the store, specifically the Mal’s E-Commerce part. We edited some of the messages sent in Customer Receipt emails (we added in how long shipping would approximately take) and got the shipping worked out. Though Warm Buddy emailed me this morning, we ended up basing the shipping on how much the customer has spent, but also taking into consideration how much the products might weigh in an order of that amount. The shipping is also split up into four different zones – BC, rest of Canada, US, and rest of the World. When a customer goes to their cart, the customer is required to choose their zone from a drop-down to calculate their shipping before continuing to fill out their information.

I also helped our client get her PayPal account sorted out. We got the correct information filled in, so we’re waiting for the account to be verified which should only take a few days. In the mean time, Emma took down the link to the store. I also emailed Warm Buddy to get some confirmation on our shipping costs, as per our client’s request, to see if they have any suggestions or if it’s all good. Once everything with the store is confirmed, it can go online as well!

Everything is running pretty smoothly with the website. We have come across some snags here and there, but we have managed to work through them. For the rest of the semester, we have the client’s training and manual to create. Reiko wants to put it together, so I am going to be going through all the different processes with the store to give the steps to Reiko. I’m going to cover everything from editing the store front, as well as the Mal’s behind-the-scenes part.

Ps. Have you gone to the site yet? No? Well get on it!