Kempston Controls - Product Based Web site and Distributor Extranet
The Kempston Controls site is principally an eCommerce site with a fully searchable database of their entire product offering with up to date stock levels, online ordering and order history review facility for existing clients. This is another example of an AI site with a substantial database of over 100,000 product lines and well over 500,000 rows of data representing the order history over the past 5 years for Kempston's entire client base. Product details are bulk imported as .csv files via AI, and the system has proved fast and reliable with large imports. Managing this via AI gives Kempston the flexibity to edit and manage products shown on the site whilst not having to alter their internal product management database.
The Order History area and stock level data are imported automatically overnight directly from an export from the Great Plains database that Kempston use internally. We manage to import in the region of 500,000 rows of data in about 25 minutes with the safety of transactions - should anything go wrong everything is rolled back to the previous known good state, ensuring continuous service.
Another feature of the Kempston site is the complete product listings as plain old flat HTML pages that can be viewed from the Manufacturers pages. We ensured links to these pages are conventional HREFs for SEO purposes.
Searches on the product range are kept fast and accurate by optimising indexing, query results caching and table types within the database. After the stock level data is imported into a INNODB format table, we convert that to MYISAM format, for example.
There are three types of site user and for each the site automatically gives them the appropriate checkout process: new customers can pay online using a credit card (via Streamline); overseas customers can request formal quotations; and existing Kempston customers can place their order direct and pay on account as they would when placing an order by phone.
www.kempstoncontrols.co.uk
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