Case Study
The Client
 Fosters of Birmingham is one Europe’s largest fishing tackle retailers, mail order and on-line
specialists. Fosters is a family business established in 1978 and is owned and
run by brothers Richard and Mark Foster.
Fosters carry stock in excess of £1million and employ a staff of around
20. Most of their business centres on Coarse, Match and Specimen fishing
tackle although they also carry significant stocks of both Sea and Game fishing
tackle.
The Challenge
Fosters of Birmingham first ventured onto the web early in 2000. Although their
first website was only a static awareness website they started to receive
enquiries and orders as a result of their exposure to new customers.
Fosters wanted to develop an e-commerce website to sell their products online
but were concerned at the seemingly mammoth task of transferring their range of
30,000+ products into a format that could be utilised online. They had an in
store point of sale system which contained their entire range of products but
as the system was only designed to be used internally by members of staff, much
of the data was in a format that would be almost meaningless to a website
visitor.
The Solution
 Pin Digital created an e-commerce website comprising dynamic
pages and a dynamic menu system. Not only does this enable the Company to add
and update new products to the website, but they can also create whole new
categories that appear automatically in all the menus displayed on the site.
The site was developed using PHP scripting language and a MySQL database. An
open source approach was selected as it offered considerable cost savings over
other comparable technologies.
Pin Digital helped Fosters to extract all the meaningful data from
their in-store legacy database and migrated it into a format that could be
used online. The data was then cleansed by Foster’s staff and fields such as
product descriptions were enhanced.
The new website was given a modern looking, intuitive interface which included
features such as a ‘favourites’ wish list, a dynamic best sellers list, and a
user mailing list.
All transactions on the website are processed via 128 bit SSL encryption. 128
bit encryption is a technology that ensures the safety of data transmitted over
the Internet such as credit card details.
The site contained a back-end administration and order management system. This
enables the staff at Fosters to easily manage orders, products, as well as
generating reports, sales receipts and the processing of payments.
Finally Pin Digital developed a Bulletin Board on the site to allow customers
and visitors to the website to converse with one another about venues,
products, baits and even to discuss some of the lighter issues surrounding the
fishing industry.
The Bottom Line
Fosters of Birmingham’s e-commerce website receives in excess of 100,000
visitors per month. These visitors generate a staggering 500,000+ page views
per month which helps to generate a very profitable income stream.
 |
We are proud to boast that the Fosters of Birmingham website is one of the best
fishing tackle e-commerce websites on the internet. Our online turnover
continues to grow and has doubled in the last 6 months alone. Pin Digital has
supported us along the way to ensure this growth continues and that we stay one
step ahead of the competition.
Mark Foster, Proprietor, Fosters of Birmingham |
|
Project Specification
| COMPANY: |
Fosters of Birmingham |
| SECTOR: |
Retail |
| THE SOLUTION: |
E-commerce website |
| URL: |
www.fostersofbirmingham.co.uk |
| TECHNOLOGY: |
Windows 2000 Server
PHP, JavaScript
MySQL Database |
|
|
|
|
|