Store Spotlight-ID Zone

This week’s store spotlight is on ID Zone, a leading online retailer of photo identification products; specializing in everything that a business or organization needs to create, print, manage, and wear photo ID badges.  The store, which opened for business on February 7th 2011, was developed in conjunction with Fuze, a web hosting, development, and design firm, and carries over 2,500 different products.

"The goal of this particular project for ID Zone was to refresh the brand look & feel, and relaunch the site with a completely new UI design, architecture, and a host of new, customer tools to make sorting through the seemingly countless configurations of products that they sell, simple," says Bryan Landaburu, President of Fuze.

"As part of the process we needed to bring the store over to Miva Merchant’s current PR7 release which would give us the ability to make ID Zone PA-DSS/PCI compliant,” adds Landaburu." The existing site had been online since 2005, so it was time for a change.”

Fuze chose the Miva Merchant shopping cart platform for ID Zone because of its speed, performance, security features, technical support, and development assistance, as well as the ability to migrate large amounts of data of a live, revenue producing ecommerce site without tremendous loss of data or time. Fuze looks for many things in a shopping cart, Lanaburu explains,  all of which they were able to find with Miva Merchant.

Essential Shopping Cart Features

• Content Management
• Custom products
• Faceted search and suggestive search methodologies
• Product finder options
• Reviews and ratings
• Social sharing/integration
• Intelligent guided user interface
• Contextually relevant content, news and promotions
• Extensive search optimization
• Custom pricing rules and customer types
• Integration to back end order processing and fulfillment

"Our business and our customers benefit from uninterrupted service, and our marketing team benefits from an evolved, but familiar, user interface," says Jennifer Clancy, ID Zone Marketing Manager.

"The ability to efficiently manage large amounts of data is critical to our business—both as part of the initial re-launch and in our ongoing site data and content management. Being able to leverage this capability, combined with not needing to completely re-learn a new management system streamlines things for us internally," adds Clancy.

"Our clients are typically working to attain market share, not just "sell things online" and that’s why they come to us for assistance," says Landaburu. "It should be interesting to both store owners and developers alike that stores like ID Zone are not the product of one person’s effort. These projects are a collaborative effort of multiple talented individuals and small teams that come together and make these things happen. While Fuze tends to guide and direct the process, it is really the effort of our entire project team that makes these complex and intense projects possible."

The ID Zone Project Team

• Fuze – Architecture, data design, UI, concepting, user scenarios, UI design, CSS/templating and Core development, order processing/ fulfillment Integration, component integration, and overall project management.
• ID Zone – the client team is made up of 5 experienced staff members dedicated to content creation, product and category development, merchandising, promotional development, and multi-channel marketing strategy.
• SearchSpring – providers of ID Zone ecommerce site search
• NetBlazon – custom module development, data integration, and migration assistance
• Miva Professional Services – core template integration, Miva core customization, business rule implementation, data and migration assistance.
• Hostasaurus – rock solid hosting, intimate Miva core platform knowledge, extensive backup and migration assistance.