Situation

As founder and president of Your Safety Place, Brian Klosterman had created his new concept store, serving the safety and security needs of people in the San Francisco Bay Area, and was reaping the benefits of satisfying a need that up until then meant visiting a multitude of stores and suppliers.

It was now possible to visit a single store to find everything from 1st aid to trauma kits, and from CERT safety wear to portable generators. The business was an instant success and the message of what Klosterman was doing was spreading far and wide.

Behind the scenes

Although the business was a great success, Klosterman felt that he could offer far more if he could harness the internet as an effective selling tool. Many prospective customers lived too far away to visit the store, or wanted to shop after hours, and eCommerce was the way forward. However, the needs of the business meant, although eCommerce would be perfect for the initial phase, it would not solve all of their future requirements. They were transitioning towards dealing with medium to large size companies with between 1,000 and 20,000 employees, as well as educational establishments and government bodies and the need to offer a corporate portal and keep account of customer purchasing and staff was paramount.

Klosterman meticulously researched the available options and found that many offerings were either too complex to operate or were not flexible enough to develop beyond a simple web store. The search was on to find a solution that would deliver on all of his business aims.

Solution

Your Safety Place chose the flexibility and control offered by LAN Services, opting for a fully customized web site with built in RMS cart technology to fully utilize their existing Microsoft Dynamics RMS installation.

LAN Services advanced hosting solution receives product information and updates on an hourly basis, ensuring that the web store is always up to date with new pricing and promotions. What's more, orders are downloaded to the distribution centre as often as required, ensuring that all customer orders are dealt with quickly and efficiently.

RMScart technology ensures that all of the data entered into Dynamics RMS is seamlessly and automatically synchronized with the web site, ensuring that the Your Safety Place staff can concentrate on the job of great customer services, rather than coordinating technical processes. Klosterman explained, “now everyone has a place to go for the right supplies and information, at the right prices, right here and right now.”

The first phase for Your Safety Place was an integrated eCommerce web store with custom design services. As the company has grown, winning clients such as Cisco and Abbot Labs, their needs have grown and they are now embarking on the next phase; using LAN Services affiliate tracking services and also building a corporate portal, where each company's employees see their own site under the Your Safety Place umbrella.

President of LAN Services, Anil Jindal commented, “Our flexible approach to delivering web solutions has been significant in winning the confidence and trust of customers like Your Safety Place. I am proud of the work that my team has produced for them.” He added, “We have a lot of advanced technology within our product and it's great to see so many companies benefiting from our expertise.”

Benefits

Having a reliable and versatile eCommerce presence has increased revenue targets beyond expectations, both in store and on the web, since the overwhelming success of the web site has done much to drive new customers through the doors.

“Having such an intuitive solution integrated with our back office has saved the costly overheads of trying to run two separate businesses”, says Klosterman. “It reassuring to know that with only the one system, we are able to produce meaningful reports and react to change rapidly. We can now manage more product lines and have expanded our manufacturing capabilities to cope with increasing sales.”

RMS cart driving the web site has ensured that the solution for Your Safety Place is totally flexible and able to adapt to the changing economy and demands of safety preparedness.

About LAN Services

Since LAN Services' inception in 1997, the company have been providing custom programming and web development services to companies across the US. Specialising in RMScart, an affordable eCommerce solution integrated with Microsoft Dynamics RMS, LAN Services team of 45 project managers, designers, programmers and support staff are able to provide both high quality off-the-shelf shopping carts and totally custom projects to meet a customer's specific needs.

Opportunity

World of Cables is a shopping cart that provides online shopping facilities to its customers for computer cables, PDAs and other accessories. With a web presence of more than three years, World of Cables was still struggling to survive among its competitors on the internet. Their ever increasing database was posing difficulties in managing the website on the back end, as also it was reflected in mediocre navigation for its customers on the front end. Thus, LAN Services was approached for a strategy based shopping cart with a comprehensive database for leveraging its identity on the Internet.

Solution

As a first measure towards establishing a strong identity on the internet, LAN Services initiated with augmenting the graphics of the website. Taking the existing look and feel of the website, LAN Services worked towards building easy to navigate and search web pages.

The database was developed to culminate a store of more than 6000 items for the inventory which was hosted on our own server. Since the objective was to hike sales amidst a stringent competition, online marketing was completely handled by LAN Services. Extensive search engine optimization and web promotion was carried out to converge traffic towards World of Cables. Various lucrative features like ‘Real Time Shipping Cost Calculator’ were added for the customer advantage. The website was integrated with SSL 128 bit certificate layer in conjunction with COMODO to assure the customer of complete security.

Our diligent team of programmers developed various functional utilities to track record of visitors on the website, and other revenue statistics. Back end utilities were provided to the client for generating periodic sales and supervising revenue generating products and orders.

Impact

With a smart approach towards web promotion and search engine optimization, the net traffic showed a steep rise to around 300+ visitors per day from a humble 20 hits in the beginning. Within a span of three months, orders started pouring in and sales shot up to generate a whooping three fold profit.