Enabling Real-Time Reservations
WebReservations
To resolve the bottleneck created by the company’s business hours we enabled a complex, custom-designed eCommerce solution.
A boutique events rental business, operating out of California, set their heart to enable their clients to make reservations in real-time.
Driven by excellence in services, offering unique products and delivering the best customer experience in the industry, the challenge was accepted.
As part of their brand and business evolution they wanted to advance the capabilities of their website to enable clients to do more and in turn improve operations by automating repeatable and foreseeable processes
The Website Development Challenge
- Enable eCommerce experience, which integrates with ERP solution
- Develop real-time reservations functionality which takes in account business rules such as inventory levels and dispatch calendar availability
- Design an experience, which matches the event rental’s contract flow
Research and Planning
Founded on years of experience in eCommerce, we followed best-practices to design the checkout flow to match the needs of the rental business.
Bonus Solution 2: Dynamic Functionality on the product Level
As part of advancing this website’s experience, we also worked with their team to create collections for products where it made sense. Depending on whether the user is logged in and what type of account they have they would be able to add to a wishlist only or a reservation they have in the works.
Ultimately, we were able to deliver solutions, which were developed to fit this events rental company as a glove. More importantly, these solutions enabled both internal staff and online users to utilize time better and improve the flow of work.
Once the experience was sketched out, and business rule and operational questions were answered, our team dove into the deep blue ocean of investigating how to connect the ERP with the front-end of the website.
The Solution
The result of this strong partnership inpioneeringa. solution, accessible to all clients of the ERP, we had a fully-functional eCommerce solution, specifically serving the event rental world. It takes in account complexities such as:
- Inventory levels checked in real-time via the ERP
- Pre-defined venue lists for easier user experience
- Calendar availability, which checks dates in real-time
- Fees, including delivery, surcharges and taxes
- Payment profiles of clients
The Evolution
Our client’s calling card in the events community is their deep understanding of what it takes to successfully run big events, and the format in which contracts are delivered. As glamorous as an event can be on the outside, the backend operation needs to be succinct and simple.
We took the concept of eCommerce and made it fit the industry’s models, rather than expect the industry to change the way they do business. This eCommerce platform replicates the contract professional event planners are used to seeing and operating with.
That allows them to browse the company’s online catalog, add, modify, and rearrange items as they need to, select event locations, set delivery dates, and ultimately process their reservations in real time. All done in a format that makes sense to them.
All of the convenience these users get is powered by enterprise resource planning (ERP) system which accommodates the company’s specific business rules around inventory and scheduling thresholds, associated fees and taxes, mandatory and options services, and so on. This prevents the warehouses or delivery teams from overbooking and notifies users and staff when a phone conversation is necessary to resolve specific scenarios.
An important aspect of enabling this functionality was to allow the business to determine what clients can have access to real-time reservations.
For everyone else an alternative solution was developed…
Bonus Solution 1: Wishlist and Request for Quote
As private parties plan their events the company wanted to enable the functionality to add products they like from the catalog to a wishlist.
The wishlist achieves the following purposes:
- Create an account
- Create a list
- Add, remove or change the quantities of items on the wishlist
- Save your progress for later
- Share your list with other parties
- When ready with a couple of clicks request a quote for the wishlist items
