Flash-sale fashion club: new storefront design with timed sale events

The challenge

A members-only shopping club selling premium women's designer fashion was moving to a new look. Its online store already existed, and a ready HTML design had been produced for the new version. A reseller brought us in to turn that design into a working storefront theme and adapt the store to the club's flash-sale way of selling.

Flash-sale clubs sell through time-limited events rather than a fixed catalogue, so the store had to present each sale as an event with its own category page and a visible countdown. Shoppers needed to narrow down by brand and price, prices had to show in Indian rupees, and the club wanted to capture newsletter sign-ups and keep product URLs friendly for search engines.

What we did

• Theme conversion. We converted the supplied HTML into an OpenCart theme, shared it on our demo server for review, then committed it to the reseller's SVN repository and deployed it to the live store.
• Sale events. We built event and sale category pages with countdown timers, and added an admin link for managing upcoming events.
• Shopping tools. We added a brand filter, a price filter, rupee currency, breadcrumbs and a newsletter sign-up popup.
• SEO and email. We set up SEO-friendly product URLs on the pre-production site, kept the price filter working with those URLs, added meta tags and introduced an HTML registration email.
• Admin and catalogue fixes. We added upload for a third product image and fixed cart issues, including the remove button.
• Test rounds. We worked through successive client bug lists from August to October 2012.

Tech stack

PHP, OpenCart, vQmod, SVN