The project
Aita Dance is a large chain of stores in the industry of professional dance shoes and dancewear with stores and warehouses in several countries in Eastern Europe and more than 15 years of history on the market. They reached us with a request to build an online shop tailor-made to their needs which includes building an advanced back-end for product and order management, supporting multiple languages and currencies with payment processing, stock management for warehouses in different locations, advanced shipping charges calculations, based on the clients location and nearest warehouse, as well as linking the client’s ERP to the system for handling many possible scenarios. We also made the complete web design of the new online shop.
Back-end
We were excited to take on a project based on Django and Oscar for e-commerce. Building a fully customised online shop for a business with such a large database of products and wide variety of properties for them has created numerous challenges to overcome. Our main goal was reaching the best possible site speed and performance. We’ve developed an elaborate solution for communication with the client’s ERP, handling a substantial amount of product data. In order to achieve best performance we’ve used a multi-level cache. In addition we’ve created an algorithm for distribution of orders between the warehouses based on the client's location, current stock availability and other conditions. The client’s business serves dozens of countries worldwide from a number of brick-and-mortar stores and warehouses around Europe which requires support for multiple currencies and payment methods. Our design and development team worked closely with the clients to ensure that the system provided not only the best prices for their clients but also a seamless UX during the product availability checks, pricing calculations, overall supplies and order management. The product of our work was a fully customised ERP connection solution which can be integrated in the client's future projects for other online businesses.
Front-end and UI/UX
Having such a large online shop with many product categories with unique properties requires a solid UI to guide the clients through the process of finding their product and placing an order. The design team had to understand the specifics of the professional shoes and dancewear industry and its needs for advanced search and filtering options. We've designed an interface for displaying a large catalogue of product types with all of their unique properties in an intuitive way for the customer – from shoe colours, heel sizes and types, through clothing, versatile accessories, promotional offers, etc. One of the client's requests was for us to create a dynamic UI, based on the client's professional interests – ballet, latin and ballroom dancing, gymnastics, etc.
The result
Both our team and the client are really proud of what we achieved. We've created not just a standard online shop, but a tailor-made system which addresses Aita Dance's specific needs for their large catalogue of products, presented in an easy and intuitive way to the customer with advanced filtering options and a truly elaborate ERP system connection to manage all worldwide orders through their multi-country chain of stores and warehouses, quickly and reliably.
