A new site and a new set of boundaries have been broken with this build. Not only that but this was a local build to our home area of Grand Rapids which made it a little more special. This site was a ton of fun and continues to be a ton of fun at the time of writing for this, to build.

Korting Outlet without the site is a bargain bin store . In it’s original iteration this site was just an advertisement for the brick and mortar bargain bin stores. It brought to light the several locations of this business across the west Michigan area and helped it’s customer get to the stores to score some great deals on items that you can’t find anywhere else. Once we got the site running and looking good it was off to the races on getting all of the features put into place to bring in thousands of views (and sales) a day.

The first of the features were to integrate the site with the main inventory system of the business and get the ecommerce platform ready to go to create listings. This was a fairly similar practice that we are used to doing regularly. Following this we started to implement the fun stuff like auctions for customers to bid on. Normally this is a fairly easy practice as well but this site was very custom in very different sections and required a lot of extra coding and custom functions to make everything work together wisely.

Auctions went together fairly smoothly and worked great allowing people to find tons of great items as well as getting the site to communicate with the business home-base to fulfill orders. This allowed the site to take the orders as well as the employees to be able to get the orders ready for pickup and notify customers that things were ready to go.

The last thing that was put in at time of writing was the Pre-bidding system. Posting the auctions early and allowing customers to place offers before the auctions opened up gave end users a bit of action early and access to the many different items that they might be seeking without having to sit at their station waiting for things to pop up on the timers. This was a completely custom function that was built on top of the auctions platform that was a custom function as well that was built on top of the WooCommerce platform as well.

So many of the pieces of this site were put together in a custom sense to fit the business need and set them apart from the competition. It was a great journey to be on and complete. Now, at time of writing, there are a few more things that are being planned out to be put into place but those will be written about at a later time after they are put into place and tested. The custom integrations and many functions of this site made it one of our best offerings to date and I look forward to servicing / updating it as the needs arise.

Depending on where you are at on this site, it loads quickly and in some spots where it is pulling a lot of dynamic data it’s a little bit slower, such as on the ever changing auctions page. On day one, before everything was added to the site feature-wise we had a sub one second load. As we continued to build this one the speed of the more robust pages were a little slower as it had a lot to load in. There also has been a bit of a fight for bandwidth as the site continues to grow and have more and more people bidding on auctions.

As in all cases the site was designed by our design partner Dog Ear Marketing. Since it’s original design it has grown considerably and will continue to grow as more customers find this hidden gem. We look forward to watching it’s progress.