Goimagine

goimagine.com
A marketplace of caring economy

Business Area:

  • DIY
  • Jewelry
  • Home & living
  • Bath & beauty
  • Clothing
  • Art & collectibles
  • Fun & games
  • Wedding & celebrations
  • Gift certificates

Services:

Location:

Goimagine is a marketplace of handmade gifts and artisenary with the main idea around donations. 100% of profits is donated to charity. Jon, the founder of goimagine.com, an entrepreneur with a huge experience in running online businesses, chose the CS-Cart platform and our team to implement his concept into life.

The goal of goimagine is to prove that an eCommerce company can succeed by focusing on social good rather than investor profits. All of the profits from goimagine be donated to children’s charities, with our first charity being Horizons for Homeless Children. Horizons for Homeless Children is a charity that works to help alleviate the trauma and stress of homelessness on both children and their families by providing high-quality early education, vital opportunities for play, support for parents, and crucial advocacy.

Jon Lincoln, interview for Medium

Challenge

  • Customize vendors’ admin pages
  • Customize gift functionality
  • Make design changes
  • Study reasons of slow checkout

Implementing the Project

Hiding vendors’ products

It was found that vendors are able to post products to the marketplace even if there isn’t a working shipping method for those products. Buyers could not complete a purchase because shipping wasn’t set up properly by the vendor. To exclude any human error while listing products, our team implemented a functionality where vendor products are hidden under certain conditions. We tied the creation of shipping methods to whether a product can be active in a vendor store or not. If rules weren’t met then products remained hidden or disabled. A warning pop-up on the Vendor Admin Panel appears:  “WARNING: Your store is either missing shipping methods or there are shipping methods that aren’t configured properly. Please make sure your shipping is set up correctly.” The only exception from these rules are the downloadables since they aren’t shipped. 

Vendor panel modifications

We modified the vendor admin panel to show more settings and made it more convenient for sellers to manage their dashboards.  Оn the “General” tab new settings appeared:
  • Show the “Taxes” checkbox.
  • Show the “Disabled rate areas” checkbox. When the setting is disabled, then we hide disabled rate areas for vendors on the ‘Shipping time and rates’ tab on details shipping method page.
  • Show the “International U.S.P.S.” section on the configure tab for USPS Real-Time checkbox. 
On the “Products” tab, following was introduced:
  • “Category limits” input field. We limit vendors from being able to apply one product to unlimited categories on the details product page and import products. This limit helps to exclude any manual error from the vendor side.
  • A checkbox to hide active products (not digital) if the vendor has a shipping method not configured. The setting helps to ensure that only the products with the correctly configured shipping methods are displayed in the marketplace.
The “Add-ons tab” was expanded with such checkboxes as:
  • Show this tab after “Shipping properties” tab. 
  • Show the “Facebook” section. 
  • Show the “Bestselling” section. 
  • Show the “Comments and reviews” section.
New settings made the dashboard more handy as the most functionality they usually apply is here at hand.

Design changes

This modification covered the following settings:
  • A checkbox to show the Goimagine Marketplace Terms & Conditions checkbox at checkout. 
  • A checkbox to show the vendor contact information on the details vendor page. 
Vendor names are now displayed with a link to a vendor store on all product list layouts:
  • Grid;
  • List without options;
  • Compact list.
Additionally we introduced a “wishlist” button on the checkout and product cart pages next to the “Remove” button. When the button is clicked, it moves the product out of the cart to the customer’s wishlist.  We used the ‘heart’ icon for this new button. When hovering over it, the color turns orange.

Changes for the Gift recipient

Jon addressed us with a request to improve the logic of creating coupon codes for vendors. It was decided to modify the Promotions add-on to let vendors create promotions for their own products. If a shopping cart has multiple products in it from different vendors and a vendor promotion is applied, then the promo works for those products only.  The implementation entailed some design changes to:
  1. Hide SKU # from Product Page Layout;
  2. Change the size and ratio of the Vendor Logo;
  3. Show Gift Recipient Address Section on Invoice and Packing Slip;
  4. Align center the Vendor Banner.
We changed the Invoice and Packing slip documents. If the Gift Recipient name & address fields are populated then the “Ship to” section of the Invoice and Packing slip displays the Gift Recipient Name & Address.
We hided the SKU # (Product Code) from the Product Page and changed the size and ratio to Vendor Logo on the Vendor page:
We placed the Vendor banner in the center for the cases when an uploaded banner is not full width.

All these measures made the vendor page more clean with an intuitive interface and clear logic.

Auto filling for the MPN field

We created an add-on for auto filling the MPN field. The new script sets the value for the default Manufacturer Product Number field automatically, if it was left empty after the product creation.

YouTube video gallery modification

After buying YouTube Video Gallery, Jon came to us with a suggestion to improve the add-on and make it more fitting for his store. He would like to make a simple edit to it in the Vendor Admin Panel. It was required to:

  1. Remove the product setting “Replace the main image” so that vendors could not make a video into their Product’s Main Image;
  2. Make it infeasible to create a Youtube video tab on the product for vendors.

All these measures helped to avoid possible mistakes and moderate adding of new videos by vendors.

Slow checkout

One more request Jon sent to us was about the speed of loading the checkout page.

We conducted the CS-Cart platform performance study and did not reveal any problem with the code. Our expert recommended checking the server with the network bandwidth and addressing the current hosting provider for server issues. Jon was advised to go with another hosting. For CS-Cart and Multi-Vendors owners, we usually recommend reverting to our Cloud Hosting as this team knows the platform inside out and can better configure the server infrastructure for the sake of the optimal speed and behaviour of the platform.

Results

Things are going great. We've been steadily growing and continue to develop the marketplace to be better.

Jon Lincoln, Goimagine marketplace owner

Our cases

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