Shamballa Jewels
A brand new award-winning ordering system for a world-renowned jeweller
Winning awards, breaking records
How we made it happen
The setup
We developed a new ordering system for Shamballa Jewels using Umbraco CMS and Ucommerce.
Among the unique features is a 3D jewellery designer for iPad/Desktop for retailers all over the world. It can show all possible options for adapting and changing a piece of jewellery based on what is in stock, and information on what is in stock can be taken directly from Shamballa Jewels’ ERP system.
It took about one and a half year to design the solution, starting with prototyping and analysis and finally implementation on Ucommerce/Umbraco with .NET, MongoDB and TypeScript.
The process
A part of the project concerned conversion and adaptation of all previous orders. This means customers can visit any Shamballa dealer and have possible changes to jewellery visualized by keying in their lock number.
When a bracelet, a necklace or other pieces of jewellery have been ordered from a dealer through the jewellery designer, the order goes directly into Shamballa Jewels’ ordering system.
We have developed the ordering system on top of Shamballa Jewels’ ERP and it handles everything from confirmation of orders, prioritization of orders, production of jewellery, forwarding and invoicing.
The main challenge was making a jewellery designer that worked without plug installation and on all main browsers and tablet devices with high image quality for jewellery beads.
We were investigating multiple plug-ins but came up with using a technology that has been available since 1997 – image map 😉
The jewellery designer is actually a very big image map since it selects from 100 of GB of images automatically rendered out as single images from models in 3D studio max – saved in a media cloud as PNG - and positioned via a template system in Umbraco / Ucommerce to set up new templates by webmasters (components availability comes from ERP).
Therefore, each component is a PNG image (and PNG only uses space for what is image, not transparent area). In runtime, there is no server-side request. Everything is rendered out when loading the model as Typescript that makes the designer very fast.
"We have worked closely together with Compent for 2 years on improving our sales process. The new Shamballa Jewels retailer platform has optimized our internal process, external communication and most importantly the experience for our customers designing their personal jewelry. We are very happy with the result!"
What we accomplished
Customer experience
You can see what a piece of jewelry looks like in 3D before you order it. You can see all options and combine your own unique piece of jewelry on an iPad in the shop.
Transparency
You can always see what is in stock and current prices are in the shop. And, if you have already bought a Shamballa bracelet, you can see which options you have for modifications.
Fewer errors
The people who produce the items know exactly what has been ordered, they know the item number and they can see the visualization.
Fast delivery
When a piece of jewellery has been ordered, the customer and the dealer can see precisely how far it has come in the process until it is delivered to the customer.
