buy.mestor.com

Presentation

BuyMestor is a Mestor's solution for the global economy. Considering that the Internet phenomenon has drastically changed the business to consumer and business to business commercial relationship, Mestor thinks that thanks to low costs, easy accessibility and real time information availability, networks boost the e-commerce solutions taking advantage of:

• improvement of the orders automation, warehouse management, shipment, etc.
• reduction of the work and management costs
• increasing the marketplace and customers
• better customer-care before the sale and after the sale
• direct communication with consumers and commercial partners
• better knowledge of the customer product and service needs
• displacement of the business to more productive areas connected via the Web
• overcoming logistic and shortage communication infrastructure obstacles

BuyMestor came up with these assumptions: it's Mestor's e-commerce solution that Mestor has made and integrated into its own informatics system to satisfy the business needs of companies that want a strong active role on the web.

Background

The Internet has strongly changed deals. In the traditional marketplaces, there is a direct interaction between agents, by physical contacts and direct communications using traditional means like telephone, fax and mail; in the new electronic marketplace, instead, there is a real time interaction via the web.
There is a gap between the "be on the Web" strategy, building own official web site to promote itself, and the "act on the Web" strategy by an e-commerce solution. This gap exists because the e-commerce benefits are unknown yet and because on integrating the Internet with the delivery and sale activities, it has a business reorganization that needs knowledge and professionalism. The e-commerce solutions start-up depends on companies capability to make this improvement, moving from the simple web presence to the real offer of products and services.
BuyMestor is an example of this presence in the new global marketplace building a "virtual store" which follows the customer through the buying procedure, from the products catalogue to the order status monitoring.

Project Objectives

The BuyMestor project offers its customers all the services needed: powerful services for website interaction, product buying and user registration. To realize this kind of customer-satisfaction Mestor think that an e-commerce platform like BuyMestor has to have the following characteristics:

• easy browsing
• easy searching of information, products and services
• complete information about products and services
• easy shopping cart management
• easy steps to complete the buying
• many payment methods available
• facility for the customer to always monitor the order status
• facility for the customer to receive news about products and services which he is interested in

Technical Approach

The e-commerce application is, for Mestor, one of most important business information components. BuyMestor is based on a complete Microsoft platform and other specific software: on this platform, an enterprise can realize low cost and high quality commercial solutions, ready to increase following his needs and to be integrated with all company information. The most important technologies performing this platform are:

• MS Windows NT / 2000 Server - Operative System which provide sure communications, applications hosting, resources, files and directories easy management
• MS Internet Information Server - Web Services, FTP, SMTP and Active Server Pages (ASP) that provide an integration between data services and commercial services
• MS SQL Server - DataBase of users information, products, orders, order status etc.
• MS ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) - Object-Oriented service which allows data access in conformity to OLE DB and ODBC standard
• Object Linking and Embedding DataBase (OLE DB) - allows to access to any data records and to visualize the request data in a standard tabular format
• Component Object Model (COM) - applications development Architecture which join the business logic and business data
• Client/Server Application - property of Mestor, for the back-office and back-end management

Expected Results

The BuyMestor project, always improving, allows buying online Mestor's products and services with an easy and good-looking graphic user interface which has the following characteristics:

• simple and advanced search and catalogue browsing
• product detail visualization
• cross-linking between the e-commerce web site and the Mestor official web site for better knowledge of the products
• adding to shopping cart by one click
• easy and simple shopping cart management
• continuous visualization of the search form and the shopping cart for simple and fast shopping
• facility to exit from the virtual store and continue the shopping after
• three step assisted buying
• only three click buying for registered users
• three payment methods (bank transfer, cash on delivery and credit card - on line)
• facility to know always the order status
• guaranteed security and privacy
• information about payment, delivery, privacy and customer's rights
• clear "help on line" to help the customer during shopping
• mailing list to inform the customer about product updates etc.
• Italian and English version