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Emerson Duty Free Shop

Emerson Duty Free Shop

Overview

The Emerson Duty Free Shop is a small duty free store on the Canadian/American border whose website offers travellers a quick, convenient online shopping experience.

Through its website, Emerson Duty Free allows online “shopper-travellers” to place orders from the comfort of their home computer, laptop or mobile device and have their products waiting for them as they travel through customs on their way to the United States.

Details and technical challenges

Prior to the launch of its website, Emerson Duty Free Shop did not have an online presence, so they were looking for a site where customers could view their product line, make purchases and eliminate the need to leave their vehicles on their way to their desired destination.

This project presented some interesting challenges from a programming perspective because of the different requirements that were simply one of a kind.

Firstly, we needed to find a way for our Catalyst Content Management system to communicate with Emerson Duty Free’s point-of-sale inventory system. This was imperative because in order for the system to work as a whole, inventory had to be accurately tracked and customers needed a confirmation e-mail letting them know that their purchase order was waiting for them.

Integrating a non-web system into a web format was intriguing. Visual Lizard worked with Norm Goertzen & Associates to ensure that the appropriate data was available to Emerson’s P.O.S-desktop software (which runs on Windows). This integration of a physical location with an online inventory tracking system was crucial because it automatically updates the website after every transaction.

Secondly, we needed to communicate with Chase PaymentTech, the financial processing company used by Emerson Duty Free. We created a PHP wrapper (web programming language) for the XML programming data that they used. This simplified the process of confirming credit card payments before forwarding the necessary order data to the Emerson Duty Free P.O.S system.

Features list

Timeframe

The Emerson Duty Free project took five months to complete. The first couple of months were spent working with Spacecadet Design while much of May and June was spent connecting all systems with Emerson Duty Free’s point-of-sale system and testing them for performance.

Partners

  • Emerson Duty Free Shop
  • Norm Goertzen & Associates
  • Visual Lizard Inc.
  • Spacecadet Design

Launch Date

July 2009

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