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Custom eCommerce Platform Development for Cloud9Living

Cloud 9 Living is the leading experience gift company in the United States. Its site, cloud9living.com, offers more than 2,100 experiences in 50+ regions nationwide, ranging from Ferrari racing and dinner cruises to spa packages, city tours, hot air balloon rides, and much more. The website allows customers to purchase gifts, exchange their gift for another and book an experience. Cadence Labs delivered a 100% custom eCommerce platform built on top of the Phalcon PHP, AngularJS, and KnockoutJS frameworks. The custom platform includes a variety of new features and ones migrated from their previous platform. Let’s take a look! 

Custom eCommerce Platform Features:

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Products + Categories

Each product can be associated to categories and geographic regions on the website. Products have a standard gallery, customer photos, content, reviews, and availability & booking details.
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Built in CRM + CMS

The built in CRM allows the customer service team to log tickets, tasks and share customer feedback. While the CMS allows the team to edit pages or blocks of content throughout the site via a WYSIWYG editor.
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Supplier / Vendor Integration

Products are linked to the corresponding supplier’s system so that booking information remains current.
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Booking Management

An easy to use booking system which allows customers to find dates & book them. Once booked the provider of the experience is notified of the booking.
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Optimized Website

Both the frontend of the website and the admin panel have been optimized for performance, making it easy and fast for all users. 
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AngularJS Checkout + Booking

AngularJS gives the user a seamless checkout and booking flow to easily purchase Experience Vouchers which can later be redeemed for an experience.
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Reporting

Robust custom reports allow the Cloud9 team to track anything & everything done on their website.
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Accounting

Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable Management which is built in with support for tracking vendor balances.
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Admin Popovers + Tooltips

The admin includes popup functionality to allow Cloud 9’s management team to leave notes throughout the admin. A robust ACL (access-control-layer) gives Cloud 9’s management granular access over their employees’ roles.
Colorado responsive website

Mobile Shoppers

One of the key requirements of the new website was making it optimized for mobile shoppers. This doesn’t just mean fast or responsive, but a true mobile-first approach with an adaptive mobile site. As part of the adaptive approach we developed a separate mobile site with a completely customized shopping experience.  The adaptive mobile site reorganizes content and prioritizes key features needed by users at the top of the page. By helping a user find the right content quickly on their phone we’ve made the shopping and booking experience better than ever! In addition to the adaptive mobile website we also optimized the site speed to make Cloud9’s website quick to download even when a user is not on Wifi. Some of the website speed optimizations are:

  • Developing a Full Page Cache with hole punching for dynamic content.
  • Implementing Google’s Pagespeed module.
  • Designing a frontend asset system that minifies & combines all static assets.
  • Utilizing a CDN to serve images and media files.

The New Frontend

Rebuilding the Cloud9 website gave us the perfect opportunity to make improvements across the frontend of the website. Let’s dive into more details about some of these great modern features on the new site.

New Product Types

We expanded on the existing product types for Cloud9 to allow new types of experiences to be purchased and booked, including:

Original Product Types

The original platform had support for gift certificates and experience product types. We migrated this functionality and associated product data to the new custom platform.

Shop By + Filtering

It’s important to get your customers quickly to the products they are looking for. That is why one of the main tasks we focused on with the new site was building a new filtering system to allow customers to shop more effectively.

Customer selects the region they are shopping in.
Customer filters by categories like Food, Driving, Golf, etc.
Customer sorts by the price or adds more categories.
Customer finds the perfect gift for their recipient!

Fast Checkout with Custom Payment System

By using AngularJS for the checkout on Cloud9’s website a user can checkout quickly without needing to load the next page. Since Cloud9’s team needs a fair amount of information during checkout this helps make the experience as smooth as possible for the team. As part of building the checkout process we also developed a number of integrations with PayPal Payments Pro and PayPal Express to allow for instant payments.

To cover Cloud9’s B2B customers we developed a B2B payment system that allows for consignment, check/money order, and other offline methods for approved accounts. This way large orders can be placed with payment terms.

The New Backend

From this…

To this!

The new admin panel provides not only a better user experience but also a number of great, time saving features for the Cloud9 team. By using the bootstrap framework as a building point we made a responsive admin panel that is clean, easy to use and capable of being used from a phone. Let’s take a look at some of these great features.

Admin Features

Tooltips

By adding tooltips to the admin it’s easy for users to remember what each field, button or other input corresponds to and should be used for.

Product Schedules

To support the needs of products which are booked and thus need to be scheduled, we developed a custom product scheduler.

Popovers

Throughout the admin there are a number of popovers which make it easier for a staff member to update content, process refunds, keep customer service notes and more.

CMS (Content Management System)

We developed a full CMS for the Cloud9 admin which allows them to edit pages, blocks, sliders, FAQs, contact forms and variables which can be used throughout the website. A WYSIWYG editor makes it easy for anyone to add content without knowing HTML.

Accounts Receivable / Payable

We developed a built in accounting management tool that allows Cloud9 to track vendor balances, run reports and create invoices.

ESP (Email Service Provider) Integration

Our platform allows Cloud 9 to send emails from multiple email providers, and provides a real-time queue showing them the status of email sends.

The Results

The new system is up and running for Cloud9 now and they are loving how it has made their lives easier, improved conversions and helped to cut overall costs. The improved admin panel has dramatically increased team efficiency while the new product types have helped sell and convert more customers. Here is the take on the project and the experience working with our team at Cadence Labs from the CEO John Augst:

We have been working with Cadence Labs since they began, and with Alan for 2 years prior to that. Cadence recently completed an entire system rebuild for our eCommerce website and administrative back-end system. This was a huge undertaking that took over 2 years to complete. Alan and his team were very organized and responsive the entire time and made things as easy as possible for us during this project. They took pride in understanding the business behind the code, and that helped tremendously and is evident in the amazing finished product. I would highly recommend Cadence Labs.

John Augst

Co-Founder & President / CEO, Cloud 9 Living

Interested In Working with Cadence Labs?

Cadence Labs is an eCommerce development agency based in Boulder, Colorado. We can help you build your own custom platform like the one we developed for Cloud9’s team. If you are interested in a quote we are happy to provide our initial consultation free of charge.
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