Growing Venture Solutions - GVS - E-commerce

Power Shift 2011 Conference

Ezra — Fri, 27 May 2011 20:41:59 +0000

The Power Shift conference helps to increase awareness and action on climate change issues among college students.

The 2011 Power Shift conference site was built on the Conference Organizing Distribution (COD). GVS enhanced the checkout functionality to allow one member from an organization to purchase a coupon code that can be redeemed for conference registration by other organization members.

GVS also developed a customized conference registration workflow that reduces the number of fields on the user registration form, while making sure mandatory conference information fields (like emergency contact information) are filled out during conference registration. These customizations to the registration workflow powered over 10,000 conference registrations.

Advomatic brought on GVS to develop the registration components, and the site has resulted in ongoing code contributions back to COD through enhancements to the uc_signup module, including a registration process that is more customizable through configuration, as well as enhancements to the uc_coupon module.

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Harvard Magazine

Ezra — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 02:44:26 +0000

Harvard Magazine needed an ecommerce solution for selling text advertisements that vary in price according to the content of the text. GVS built an Ubercart payment gateway to support the CyberSource Hosted Order Page API, allowing Harvard to process payments offsite. GVS contributed the payment gateway back to the Ubercart core project, as well as enhancements to the UC_Node_Checkout module that was used to sell the customized advertisements.

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Fusion Drupal Themes by TopNotchThemes

Greg — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 19:32:39 +0000

GVS partnered with TopNotchThemes team (a support client) and 3281d Consulting to build TNT's flagship e-commerce site, FusionDrupalThemes.com.

FusionDrupalThemes.com offers free and premium Drupal themes, as well as yearly Fusion Pro support subscriptions. The site makes extensive use of Ubercart and Panels to create these features:

Dashboards for site users, showing their forum posts, subscriptions, purchases, etc.
Streamlined checkout process focused on improving conversion rates.
An automated theme packaging system built by 3281d.
An on-site customer ticket system with complex privacy functionality.

Notable pieces of Drupal functionality built with the GVS team include:

Custom Panels panes that allow site builders to customize product and user profile pages without writing code.
A customized documentation system that combines ApacheSolr weighting and faceting for automated content presentation, along with the Nodequeue and Smartqueue Taxonomy modules for a more customized .
Performance tuning and optimization.
Customized discount rules made possible by enhancements to Ubercart's discount functionality.
Node access wrangling.

The Fusion site has a complex combination of node access requirements, including:

Premium subscriber-only support forums.
Certain users can mark their posts as 'private' to themselves and administrators.
File downloads accessible only by users who have purchased it.

Drupal site builders know that getting multiple node access modules to work together, especially on the same content type, can be tricky. The Fusion site successfully combines the following node access modules:

Private
Organic Groups
Forum Access
ACL
access_private

For more implementation details, read the excellent FusionDrupalThemes.com case study on Drupal.org.

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Lollishops

evelyn — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 01:28:06 +0000

We helped out with the development of a pretty neat multiple vendor e-commerce website. In working on it much of the code was custom but we were able to build a novel, generic per user content type quota system. Each user can purchase credits towards their quota, which allows them to submit new content.

About LolliShops - Multi Shop Marketplace

The easiest way to describe LolliShops is an upscale boutique version of Etsy, built in Drupal. Lollishops provides a turnkey solution for artistic individuals who make jewelry, clothing and art by hand. Anyone can sign up and setup a personalized online store in minutes. It focuses on the Frou Frou market (if you're not familiar with it, it's probably best described by the site). So far, LolliShops has thousands of individual stores. The theme and products shown on the home page give a great sense of the intended audience. Vendors on the site purchase the ability to sell their products on the site with 3 different selling arrangements. Two of these arrangements limit the number of products that they can create, requiring a quota system.

About the User Quota Module

Of course the first thing we did when looking to build that quota functionality was to compare all of the existing solutions. We posted a summary of our research into the Duplicate Modules Hall of Shame group for others to benefit from the research. It seemed like there was no way to do exactly what we need with the existing modules, so we set to work building a new module.

The result is the User Quota module. Currently the module is very simple. It provides two administrative screens: 1 to list all of the users with their current quotas and a second to manage the quota for a specific user.

Why bother announcing it here? To limit confusion in an already crowded area I used the project page from an old module. Doug Muth graciously agreed to let us use the old User Quota project page. Thanks, Doug!

Feature Enhancement - Easy Quota Purchases

One sad point with this module is that the Paypal integration we did for Lollishops was very site specific and cannot be directly committed and used on other sites. We are looking for sponsors to help build a simple e-commerce integration. We are debating about whether to integrate with Ubercart, or LM Paypal, or Simple Paypal Framework. Certainly in time it should provide both of these features. The real question is which to do first. Ubercart appears to have the most solid 6.x release but doesn't fit with the lightweight nature of the module.

And of course there is a need to fund that work. If you have a site that could use the ability to sell a node, please contact us so we can discuss the exact implementation.

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Top Notch Themes

evelyn — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 01:10:24 +0000

Not Your Typical Drupal Support Client

Many support clients are end users of Drupal - they need help with the menu system, and knowing what the heck nodes are.

As the creators of some of the best commercial Drupal themes (and some great free themes as well), TopNotchThemes needs more than basic Drupal support. We've helped them improve their development infrastructure and workflow to make the process of developing great Drupal themes more efficient, and to also enable some upcoming internal and client-facing features. This lets them focus on building great designs for their themes.

Chris Fassnacht was kind enough to say this about working with us:

"GVS has been a valuable addition to our team. It's a relief to have a team of experts we can rely on to keep our Drupal-based infrastructure running smoothly!"

At Drupalcon Steph thanked us with a hug. What more can you ask for from a client?

TopNotchThemes Supports the Drupal Theme Community

In addition to being providers of great themes and a good customer they are also a company that "gets it." Their community involvement speaks for itself (one highlight is this Ubercart theming thread). They are happy to pay for our time knowing that we are working to keep the modules used on their sites well maintained (see Alternative Price and Moneris).

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AUSSIE (Australian United States Services in Education)

evelyn — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:56:44 +0000

AUSSIE provides professional development workshops to over 400 schools, and wanted to collect attendee information and fees on their Drupal site without relying on the external Eventbrite service. GVS integrated Ubercart, Drupal's cornerstone E-commerce system, with Signup, the premiere Events registration module. The resulting UC_Signup module, makes it easy for attendees to register for events and pay registration fees.

With different combinations of attendees and events, events registration can be complicated for end-users and site administrators. So far, hundreds of sites have switched to uc_signup for its smooth registration workflow and easy setup.

GVS also conducted usability testing on UC_Signup, resulting in several issues that were submitted to the Ubercart project.

As part of ongoing support work, GVS has provided enhancements to Ubercart's discount functionality.

This project was completed in partnership with Dtek Digital Media.

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