It is that time of year again. Our new King’s Hunting and Gift Catalog is out and Christmas orders are pouring in. This is always the peak of our busy time around here at King’s Outdoor World. In between all of the orders that are going out the door, we try and still get a magazine out the door among many other things.
We just launched our new On-Line store. Our new store has been in the works for a long time. Why does a new on-line store take so long to launch? That is a good question. Let me give you a little rundown of what we has kept us so busy on our new store. This is not just an on-line store. What we did is take a base shopping cart software program (open source code) and totally customized it. For us, we not only take on-line orders but also call-in orders at 800-4347-6897 and check orders mailed in.
In the past we had to manage two different order sources (on-line and phone orders) and then merge them together by doing a lot of extra data entry, etc. We also had the limitaions of being on a local network with our database. This caused problems with our separate warehouse locations. We knew we could not continue with this type of system and needed something more streamlined and would offer better customer service and managment. We decided to come up with one central database. However, this would be a web based database system that would tie in the on-line shopping cart and our phone orders into one main database on our web server. By doing so, all of our information and orders would be controlled from one place and could be accessed and updated at any location.
Therefore, our basic on-line store has a lot of custom back-end programming that we are excited about. I apologize right now to all – there are still a few bugs to work out. This new system will continually be a work in progress as we have many great features we will be adding in the future. Our whole goal is to improve our customer service and provide the best shopping exprience for all, especially our club members and Hunting Illustrated subscribers.
Current subscribers can now login to their account, instantly get their 10% discount, manage their address, check on order status and even check the number of issues they have left and when it will expire. I will be honest with you, our new on-line store still looks like a cookie-cutter web site. If you know us much, cookie cutter stuff just doesn’t cut it around here. We are actually working on a new template design for our new store that will be launched in the next few weeks. This will give it a brand new look that will be more professional and what you would expect from King’s Outdoor World.
This is just another phase of what we are doing to completely revamp our web sites. We are doing it one at a time (and it is taking some time), but this re-vamp of our web sites is very exciting as it will give us the foundation to pump much more content to all of you.
So for now, check out our new on-line store. See what is availabe in our ShadowCamo clothing or buy your buddy that King’s Calendar he is hoping to get for Christmas.
Happy Holidays
David King
King’s Outdoor World
