Not your everyday online store

Hatchet had implemented a previous project with the One Night Stand Boutique team months earlier, their booking management system (BMS).

It was a natural transition as ONS’s technology partner to design and build their eCommerce website. It was decided to be built out in two phases.

Phase One: Product Showcase

We chose WordPress as our project framework for its ability to sync product listings and information with their custom built BMS.

Custom webhooks and APIs were developed in order to communicate and sync information with the eCommerce plugin WooCommerce. Initially, the “add to cart” and checkout facilities were hidden.

The website’s goal was as an initial touchpoint in ONS’s customer experience. By building customer awareness of their offering, then encouraging the customer to drop into one of their brick and mortar stores.

The secondary purpose was aimed as an internal knowledgebase. Assisting staff in the customer discussions by providing the most up to date product information.

Phase Two: Online Checkout

Around the corner though was the necessity to empower customers to self-checkout and accommodate to those that prefer an online experience or wanted to make a purchase after visiting a store. In discovery with the Director, Natalia Fiacchi, we quickly realised that this next phase of the rollout was certainly going to have a few technology gotchas to overcome. In our case, it was important for the business that online orders were distributed between the physical stores.

Having a distributed inventory makes online stores 10x harder, how do we determine what store to make the deductions from? On top of that we somehow needed to ensure that dresses were available for hire, within that store, between the customers specified date range and to also take into consideration the calculation of the extended delivery dates vs a standard walk in booking. Who would have ever thought that hiring a dress would be so difficult right?

Overcoming the challenges

The team that we have at Hatchet is remarkable. The agility we bring and the determination we have in overcoming problems with technology is what makes our job exciting.

Between the custom Laravel Application, the booking management system, and having a well versed depth of experience in both WordPress and WooCommerce we were able to retrofit our custom solution without the need of any off the shelf bloated solutions. By delivering a truly custom built solution we were able to resolve the complex business requirements that ONS Boutique presented to us.

From the client

“When we engaged Hatchet to work with us, we were still a very small dress-hire business finding our feet. We only had two locations at the time and a few staff. After taking off a little bit too quickly, without the right infrastructure, we were really struggling to keep up.

We had the product, marketing and following to continue to grow BUT we lacked the required systems and organisation to facilitate it. I trialed various off-shelf hiring/rental software and nothing ticked all of the boxes.

Luckily, somebody recommended Hatchet and we never looked back. We worked with Daniel and Matt remotely (from Adelaide & Victoria) and they listened to every single detail of what we had, and what we needed at the time. It was amazing how well they were able to understand the ins-and-outs of our operations without stepping foot in to one of our boutiques. Within weeks we had a customised product that made our bookings fault-proof but also made work-life so much better and lifted moral.

We were then able to easily open boutiques in three more states and have since introduced an e-commerce business with all the bells and whistles (Aus-Post integration etc).

It has been 2 years since we engaged Hatchet to build our initial bookings system, but not a week goes by where we don’t work with them to add or change a feature to better suit our needs at that particular time.

I can’t speak highly enough of everyone at Hatchet, and know our business would not be where it is today, had we chosen someone else.”

Natalia Fiacchi | Director @ One Night Stand Boutique

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