CarrollWelding.com

Author: Sabine Sharp – Glendale Designs

The Client:

Paul Carroll Welding Supply, Inc. provides welders, machinists, contractors, farmers, ranchers, artists and hobbyists with quality welding supplies, industrial gases, tools, welding machines, oxy/acetylene cutting and welding torches, electrodes and safety apparel. They have always been independently owned and operated in Abilene, TX since 1948.

The Project:

Carroll Welding Supply approached us to re-design their current site and add a Miva Shopping Cart, so they could sell online. What sounded easy at first, quickly grew into a very challenging project with lots of customization and added functionality.

We soon realized that ‘searchability’ was extremely important and decided to make most of the store navigation driven by SearchSpring, which in turn prompted us to set up a LOT of custom fields for the additional product data and the faceted search. Now visitors can search by brand, type, function, price, size, weight, style, etc.

The next challenge was to create ‘replacement parts products’, so visitors can order just the part for their machine that broke or wore out – complete with PDF’s for diagrams, showing all available parts, and a part list for easy one-page ordering.

The regular product pages also feature PDF downloads, Product specifications, video capability and multiple product views with image zoom, to name just some of the functionality.

Next came a resource section category that lets the store owner create articles via his Miva admin and easily add related products to the article pages so cross selling is simple.

We also created a matching WordPress blog so the client can easily write about industry news and other related subjects to keep his site fresh and engaging.

We are proud to say that the site may not look it (and it shouldn’t), but nothing is out of the box here – every screen is completely customized – with the end goal to make the shopping experience easy and keep the shopper engaged.

Additional Functionality:

• Email Address Login & Username Lookup
• Purchase Order Plus
• Mail Manager
• Mini Basket
• Coupon Redemption
• B2B no Sales Tax
• Image Extra
• Image Zoom
• jQuery Libraries
• Ultimate Wish Lists
• SearchSpring Faceted Navigation and Site Search