International online catalogue for all regions of Minitube International
Securing silver.solutions as our partner in this project proved to be the right decision right from the start. The highly skilled and extremely helpful team made absolutely sure that the website would be a success. Minitüb would therefore be more than happy to rely on silver.solutions in a similar project.
Johann Loibl, Marketing & Communications Manager, Minitüb GmbH
Overview
The aim was to develop an appealing and professional website combined with an online catalogue for industry customers. The catalogue was initially planned to be in four languages (German, English, Spanish and Russian) and addresses the international market. The new website was to bring together the various company websites around the world and communicate the company’s identity in the best possible way.
The solution in detail
A completely overhauled website was developed on the basis of the content management system by Ibexa. This CMS allows the content of the individual countries’ pages to be managed individually, meaning that the content can now be updated quickly.
The first project phase entailed developing key elements such as general pages of company information, a comprehensive catalogue with a shopping basket function and a download section.
Visitors to the website arrive at a centralised corporate section in four languages which gives them a list of countries to choose from. The visitors are then forwarded to the relevant country website or sales region, depending on which country they select.
The catalogue’s structure and products are based on the ERP system. ERP entails the products that are to appear online being marked and allocated to a region. This then guarantees that each and every customer who uses the online catalogue is presented with the products available in their region. An XML file is used to update the product master data every night. There is also a manual upload function in the website’s back end.
The high-performance CMS can be used to add marketing copy and further information to the existing catalogue pages.
The online catalogue can be accessed by all the website visitors. More in-depth product information is made available to customers with their own login. In addition to adding product details, products can also be added to a shopping basket which can then be forwarded to the relevant Minitüb region as an inquiry.
A full-text search function covers all the content of the catalogue.
The result
The project resulted in an attractive, modern and uniform Internet appearance for the international group of companies. The website content can be managed locally in the various company sectors, which keeps the pages more up to date and makes them more in line with the needs of the individual markets.
This solution is fit for the future because the tried-and-tested e-commerce solution has already been used for the catalogue. Using this as the basis, a fully fledged online store can be set up at any time.
