One Stop Eyewear is an independent optician�s practice and professional eye care centre in the town of Bourne in Lincolnshire. The original business began by providing mobile sight tests in an around the area of Peterborough. The mobile service proved very successful and popular. Within a short period of time the business owners were able to open a bricks and mortar eyecare centre providing a full range of professional optician services and wide range of spectacles. Online sales of prescription glasses continues to grow year on year with and it was this factor that decided One Stop Eyewear to look into the possibility of selling prescription spectacles on line. The company originally commissioned a local web design agency to design and build an ecommerce website which would enable them to enter the growing online marketplace and begin to sell their spectacles nationwide. The agency recommended that the new website should be built using Majento software saying that this was the only solution which could provide the specialist functionality required to collect prescription information from website customers.

Unfortunately, the decision to use the local agency proved to be a very costly decision for our client. Due to a lack of experience, the design company ran into a host of problems which took simply ages resolve. The website was eventually presented as �completed� and ready to trade however, this clearly was not the case. The website suffered from terrible performance issues with even simple pages taking up to 15 seconds to load. This problem, combined with other front end functionality that did simply did not work, made ordering a pair of glasses virtually impossible.

To add to their frustration, our client�s staff found the Majento system very complicated to use. After a long time trying to understand the basic operation of the website, they found it was taking an an immense amount of time just to load one or two products through the site admin. Eventually having become very frustrated with the system, they decided they had no option other than to close down the website.

The whole project had been an expensive learning curve. However, the success of other online opticians meant that our client was still determined to enter the online marketplace with their own ecommerce website.

By the time they contacted us, our client had been seriously burnt by the previous agency so it was very important for them to make sure that the same thing would not happen again. Obviously, they were very nervous about choosing a new agency. The last thing they needed was to end up with a second badly performing website and another large bill. They needed to be sure that we could deliver on their aspirations and be totally confident that the finished website would perform exactly as required.

We consulted in depth with the client on every aspect of the design and build. We explained our development process and provided examples of other similar and even more complex ecommerce solutions which we had built for other clients using our own ecommerce platform. Having proved that their project was well within our capabilities and expertise, our client confidently awarded us with the contract to build their new ecommerce website.

Our design team quickly got straight to work creating a fresh and modern brand identity which is now being used across the whole business linking in the high street eyecare centre with the new online offering. The website was completed to our client�s exacting specifications and provides visitors with the ability to easily order prescription spectacles through the website. In line with current legislation, it collects the customer�s prescription information and forces the customer to confirm that the prescription is up to date before accepting their order.

In addition to ordering full prescription glasses with lenses, the website also allows customers to place orders for frames on their own. Frame only orders make up a large percentage of orders for online opticians as customers look to save money when replacing broken glasses.

The website makes use of custom attribute filtering providing visitors with the ability to quickly find the type of spectacles they are looking for using checkbox filters. By checking the filter boxes, visitors are able to display glasses by gender, frame colour, brand and so on. The filters are easily edited by the site administrator who has the ability to add additional filters or remove those that are no longer relevant.