Challenge

Pandora’s Pantry came to Studio Sedition for the development of a multi-function community website. The organizers sought to develop an online community that would allow women to network, link blogs, contribute stories, and give back to selected causes through their purchases. A variety of boutique stores would be centrally managed and a portion of purchases would be directed to charities.

Solution

Studio Sedition created a website that would support the development of an online community. The site allows users to contribute blog entries, comments or stories. We built a remote content management system (CMS) called Planet Concourse to manage each of the sites products, users and orders. When a user first visits the site the category and product information is retrieved from Planet Concourse through the web service API that we developed using PHP5 and MySQL, and cached locally in the users’ session. During subsequent visits only updated data is returned to allow for up to the minute product information while maintaining the speed of the web site. The API also connects to a third-party social networking service to sync subscriber data and allow users to interact with one another. Each boutique that is created connects to Planet Concourse through the web services API to retrieve its’ products and user data. We also had the checkout process for each boutique go through Planet Concourse, which centralizes the merchant account to one domain and eliminates the overhead of having a merchant account for each boutique. Finally, we built in a donation process that allows shoppers to direct a percentage of each order to selected charities.

Result

Pandora’s Pantry provides the framework for an online community and robust e-commerce site. Visitors can use the power of their purchases to support selected charities. They can become part of the online community through participation in discussion groups and by contributing blogs, stories and comments.