1. Case-study Purpose
The goal of this case study is to deconstruct the Walters Online project, with particular attention being paid towards technical aspects and project management processes. A number of screenshots are presented which show the systems interface, design documents, and administration modules.

2. About Walter’s
'Walter's Wine & Food Store' (or Walter's for short) is a total food and wine concept store where patrons can dine in or purchase food-stuffs to take away with them. Located in the city's Southbank region, the business is well targeted at those with a high disposable income.

The café serves breakfasts and brunches, although it is essentially a food store. The fare displayed in the cabinets is targeted at affluent, high-income city living professionals. Take home salads, a range of ingredients for antipasti and terrines sit alongside more substantial food such as curries, pastas, breads and Walter’s renowned preserves.

With Walter’s catering for the upper echelon of Melbourne’s demographic, it seemed the next logical evolution to their existing online presence to offer online shopping facilities. This would offer busy professionals along with interstate and international visitors the convenience of placing online orders for gourmet food, wine, and gift hampers.

Walter’s existing web-presence generated quite an enthusiastic response. Queries were received from site visitors about the possibility of shopping for wine and food products online.

Walter’s recognised this opportunity for business growth and seized it, commissioning KDG to construct its online e-commerce solution.

This online store would also enable people to send out gift hampers from the convenience of their home to anyone in any part of Australia. The ease with which interstate orders could be handled also granted additional market penetration for Walter's.

The main project objective was to produce a fully functional, profitable, online ecommerce system that works together with the existing Walter’s Wine Bar web-presence. This would provide an alternative avenue for viewing, selecting and purchasing products from Walter’s catalogue.

The success of the system is to be measured by the number of enquiries/orders the website generates and in the reach it has on attracting prospective buyers.

4. Benefits to the Organization
In one sentence: reduced costs realised through decreased labour requirements. The website handles a lot of the steps automatically which previously had to be managed by a staff member over the telephone.

Increased market penetration - interstate orders would now be much more viable because customers in other states could see Walter’s catalogue online and purchase goods easily. Another benefit of interstate sales is the boosting of Walter’s branding and image.

Improved product awareness - high resolution images of store goods along with detailed descriptions are available online. Customers can quickly find and research the merchandise they are interested using the online tools.

Refinement of business procedures - the website automatically handles many of the steps normally involved in the purchase process (eg. selection of goods, collection of delivery and payment information, and transfer of funds from customer to Walter’s).

One boon of this automation is reduction in errors caused by Walter’s staff (eg. if a customers delivery address is incorrect, it’s because they entered it incorrectly, not because it was taken down incorrectly by a Walter’s staff member).

Customer and sales information - as purchases are made online; information is gathered and stored in a database. Over time Walters will be able to analyse a customer’s purchasing history and develop targeted marketing and promotions.

Addition of new sales channel - not only will Walter’s be selling their goods via their physical store, they now have a 24/7 presence on the Internet from which to sell merchandise.


5. The Walter’s Online Website
The Walter’s Online website is primarily designed to be an web-based selling tool. Its purpose is to allow customers to buy goods online which are normally available in the physical Walter’s store. 

Some of the things the website does include; allow a visitor to peruse Walter’s catalogue of products, provide searching facilities, with product searching by keyword (eg. 'Extra Mouldy Blue'), or by category (eg. show me all the chocolates Walter’s stocks)…

View a picture of a product and read a description about it…

Allow a shopper to add goods to their virtual shopping basket and buy the goods they’ve put in their basket…

The system lets a shopper pay for their goods either by using their credit card or an alternate arrangement made over the phone or by email...

 

 

6. Project Management
The Walters system took six weeks to complete, with two weeks taken up by the planning phase and the rest taken up by coding. Three staff members worked on the project (ie. project manager/lead programmer, programmer, and independent QA tester).

The following is a quick break-down of some of the stages involved in the project;

A powerful administration module was created as part of the project so Walter’s staff could maintain the back-end processes of the system. The admin system allows Walters to create new products manage existing items. In addition Information about orders and users is stored here. The Walter’s administration system was built using KDG’s proprietary Administration Generation System (or AGS).

 

8. ScenariosIn designing websites, it helps to imagine a few real life stories of how actual (stereotypical) people would use it. This is one scenario extracted from the system’s functional specification;