eCommerce for Anti-limited & Fat City
The client: Anti-limited & Fat City
The problem
Fat city is a well-respected specialist music retailer. Anti-limited is a small Manchester design agency supplying design services to Fat City.
Fat City approached them to design an eCommerce solution. Anti-limited had a problem: not a lot of web development expertise.
The solution
We partnered with Anti-limited to build an eCommerce and retail management system, including cash register, stock management and web functionality. It handles all transactions in Fat City stores from the same database as well as all web and phone orders.
This is a good example of a medium-large CMS and eCommerce application as shop staff publish about 150 new stock lines and web pages a week (with sound and images) and process a large number of orders through the till and website.
- The site attracts 30,000 visitors a week
- Serves upwards of 1m pages a month from a single dedicated server.
- Over 15,000 emails are sent each week to subscribers from the template-based emailer.
- The web services syndication facility publishes all 10,000 stock lines to a series of remote sites that pick up and integrate this stock in their catalogues.
The site has been a massive success for Fat City. It has doubled the size of the business in just a few years.
We continue to work with both Anti-limited and Fat City.
Technical details
- CMS and order processing simple enough for ordinary shop staff to process
- Bulk import of existing 10,000 stock lines
- Marry-up online, phone and retail sales (e.g. book online, pick up in shop)
- Stock control and till-system
- Real-time sales reporting
- Web services publishing to listings and catalogue sites such as eBay and Gemm
The site was launched four years ago as a small project in line with Fat city's budget and anticipated turnover based on an Access database and shared hosting. Over time, we have scaled-up in line with the growth in popularity of the site and increased turnover. It now runs on dedicated servers underpinned by a SQL database server.
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