Amber Sea —
Online Store of Amber Products

Redesign the store without losing data

Amber Sea is a brand that creates exquisite jewelry, souvenirs and decor items every day. In the skillful hands of masters, amber turns into luxurious paintings and exclusive works of jewelry art. Raw materials for future products are supplied from JSC Kaliningrad Amber Combine, the only enterprise in the world where amber is mined on an industrial scale. The stone is processed by hand – this is how products of the highest quality and original appearance are born.

Client’s problem and tasks

The Amber Sea online store worked on the CS-Cart platform version 4.8. Our client decided to update the look of the site. With the page layouts, he approached a contractor who redesigned them through the platform’s core files. This is unacceptable for CS-Cart: controllers, functions, templates, database structure and other elements are recommended to be modified only by using add-ons. Making changes to the core files can lead to conflicts in future updates. Exactly that happened later: while updating the store to version 4.9. the page layout crashed, the theme templates stopped working, the appearance of the online store was severely damaged.

Platform upgrade to CS-Cart 4.10.2
Redesign
Functionality improvement
Works on checkout usability

Our work process

To avoid possible errors in the course of work, we immediately updated the store to CS-Cart 4.10.2 (the actual version at that time).

It was necessary to bring the appearance of the store back to the layouts our client had before going to the first contractor. We’ve added the necessary style classes which do not touch the core files.

Products and categories

We made a detailed filter by category: it is easy to find the right products, the list of them loads quickly.

We changed the images viewing mechanism in order to be able to view the product from all sides, even from the category page, when you hover over the product thumbnail.

We have improved the sections “Favorites” and “Compare products”: the selection of products is loaded using ajax and displayed next to the corresponding icons.

We made the product page as informative and convenient as possible: we added an image scroller, hover zoom, custom (not default) social network sharing buttons, and a review scroller. The product page also has a banner with benefits. It currently says “Giving gifts to our beloved customers”, but the administrator can change this text through language variables.

We have installed our Power Labels add-on. With the help of labels, you can mark new products, promotional or popular products, and much more. This is the best way to attract the attention of the buyer to certain products and make the store more colorful and stylish. You can use built-in labels or create your own ones.

Shopping cart

The shopping cart has been customized: not only default information is displayed, but also the percentage of the discount and the number of available bonus points. This allows the buyer to better understand how much he will pay for his order.

Checkout

Prior to CS-Cart version 4.9, the checkout system in CS-Cart consisted of four steps. Such a checkout required a lot of time to complete, so simplifying and optimizing it would significantly increase the conversion. After updating to version 4.10.2, the checkout became a one-page checkout, but we did not stop there and improved it even further. We made the right block “creeping”, which is not how it works in the default CS-Cart, and added our “Individuals and Legal Entities” add-on, which allows you to create different accounts separately for individuals and legal entities. The registration and checkout sets of fields change depending on the selected option.

Customer's personal account

The appearance of any page in CS-Cart can be changed through the layout editor: just by moving and setting up the blocks. The personal account that the client wanted to receive was so different from the default that it was impossible to bring it to the layout simply by setting up the blocks. We made a personal account from scratch according to the wishes of the client, without being tied to the standard CS-Cart view.

For the convenience of customers, all personal account information is divided into 5 tabs.

In the “My bonuses” tab, a random store promotion is displayed, which the user can pay attention to and participate in.

Our work results

Updated version of CS-Cart without damaging the layouts
The resulting design of the online store matches the original layouts of the client
New convenient features for both buyers and administrators