Case Study : Madeline's Candles

Madeline's Candles, a small startup company, came to us looking for a website. At the time mainly selling candles through local stores and craft shows, they wanted an online presence that both expressed their love of candles and provided a storefront for online purchases. With several upcoming shows, they needed to have the site up and running quickly so that they could add their web site name to their business cards and capture customers after the show.

First, we began working with Madeline's Candles to develop a sense of their products. We went on site to take pictures of every candle style currently in inventory. This provided us with artistic material to create both the custom logo and the layout for the site.

Putting the online store together, we chose osCommerce as our shopping cart system. osCommerce is extremely flexible, allowing us to create the exact design that we wanted along with only enabling the shopping cart features that we needed. With a focus on ease of use, we then plugged all of the shopping cart functionality into the design. Besides allowing design flexibility, osCommerce permits Madeline's Candles to maintain the site entirely on their own. Through the web-based management interface, they are able to add, remove, and modify all of the products on the site. They can add multiple pictures or any other text that they feel is necessary to the site. In addition to updating products and pricing, Madeline's Candles can view and manage her customers through the management interface. When orders come in, invoices and packing slips are automatically generated, and they only need to hit print and then ship the product.

We had the site up and running within one week of the first contact we had with Madeline's Candles. This included setting up a new merchant account to process credit cards through Wells Fargo and authorize.net. Madeline's Candles was ready to go before all of their craft show dates, and they have already seen an increase in sales due to the site.

For more information, or if you are interested in an e-commerce site, please email sales@gambitdesign.com.