Flower Essences Rebuild

The South African Flower and Gem Essences is an online store that has been running since 1994, making it one of the oldest in South Africa. Their products are handmade and highly sought after, with well established networks of distributors in Germany, France and the United States.

Sudoserv was approached by the original project maintainer to take over the online store. Having been custom built in the 90's with HTML, CSS and Perl, it was not only dated, but also proved difficult to host as it required very specific server software in order for the backend to function correctly.

We were then tasked to find a modern solution that would provide the same level of functionality as the old store and that also was on par with the client's budget.

• This project had a very limited budget,
• The original store was very old and did not have the ability to export the product data of its 200+ products,
• The product data in the provided documents was unformatted and missing a lot of information,
• There was a lot of other supplemental data nested in a variety of old excel documents that needed to be on the store.

• Narrowed down the choice of E-Commerce platform to Woocommerce as the lowest barrier to entry with additional self-management options,
• Used some Google Sheets magic to correctly format and process the product data that would allow it to work with a CSV importer,
• Applied batch processing to the images to format their size and allow for additional images for hover effects,
• Added all supplemental data to secondary pages with additional functionality.

• A highly functional, visually appealing and polished website was delivered to the client,
• The new store allowed for greater oversight and management over products and orders,
• The store saw a substantial increase to sales over the months that followed and continues to make record sales.