- Cheap as Chips
We were engaged to bring their motto of “there’s always something new” to life on their website.
Part of this project's brief involved consolidating the company's two existing websites into a single, comprehensive platform that would facilitate their main objectives of an online presence.
These objectives include: showcasing their extensive product range; promoting their latest catalogue; assisting users in finding their closest store; and advertising job vacancies, and collecting applications.
Cheap as Chips relies on their own, internally-developed stock management system to track 10,000+ products across 35 stores. Due to the scale and complexity of their product data, it was essential that the website pulled directly from their existing system, allowing their staff to continue managing this data from a single source. Our development team worked closely with the company's in-house resources to integrate the website with their product database, using an API and custom-built functionality to automatically sync the website with their current inventory. Store information—including stock levels, business address and opening hours—are also updated via the API.
The API also flags products that are in the current catalogue, which are then pulled out on the homepage and on the Specials page. This provides continuity across the company's marketing efforts, allowing them to promote a consistent subset of products. Additionally, the homepage highlights a featured product, randomly selected on page load, which perfectly ties in with the company's slogan: "Always something new".
On their first visit to the website, users are asked to enter their postcode via an attention-grabbing modal window. Mobile users are prompted to allow access to their device's geolocation services to automatically share their current location. Following this, the user's location is cached and used to determine their "local store". From this data, we can appropriately order stores when displaying stock levels for a product; the user's local store is featured prominently, followed by the closest stores.
To make the website more dynamic and engaging, we developed a series of seasonal themes that can easily be applied to the website via the Content Management System. These themes can be used to support broader promotional campaigns, for holiday events such as Christmas or Halloween.