> Services >> Business Process Optimization
Take full advantage of the Internet's potential to optimize your business processes, while at the same time safeguarding the
thing that matters most: your company’s vital data.
- Securely integrate ordering, processing, fulfillment and invoicing into a single powerful administration system with:
- User accounts
- Credit card and PayPal transactions
- Process monitoring and alerts
- Delegate access privileges based on user profiles:
- Allow employees to manage pricing changes, product descriptions and inventory with ease
- Provide customers with a personalized control center where they can
access the data and services they need and/or have paid for - Allow your advertising partners and affiliates to update, manage and
analyze their own content
- Monitor and analyze your business with real-time statistics on:
- Inventory
- Sales
- Usage
- Click-through rates
- Shipping data, and more
Case Study: Foliotwist, LLC., Boise, Idaho, USA
Victor and his team have worked with us every step
of the way to create a top-notch service for our artists.
They have incorporated our designs, listened to our
feedback, and always respond promptly to our questions.
No matter what we throw at them (and we've asked for
a lot!) they continually impress us with their professionalism and quick turnaround times. I have the utmost confidence in RaffSoftware and would go nowhere else for database and software development.
A portfolio website host dedicated to artists, Foliotwist.com brings together all the tools an artist needs to promote and sell his or her work on the internet. Foliotwist integrates image galleries, art blog, email newsletter, PayPal buttons for purchasing artwork online, domain purchasing and more – all within a simple control panel that is easy for the non-expert to manage.
In 2006 painter Dan Duhrkoop started a website for artists called EmptyEasel.com for sharing techniques and advice on oil painting. He soon realized that his fellow artists were just as interested in learning how to sell their art online as they were in painting technique, and he began offering marketing advice to artists who wanted to learn to use the internet to promote and sell their work.
Online sales and promotional tools such as PayPal and blogging sites had been in place for years, but many required internet "know-how" to get started, and there was a bewildering array of options to choose from. For Dan's artist colleagues, many of whom were not technically savvy, or who simply wanted more time to focus on making artwork, it was overwhelming. The alternative – to join an established online gallery – often meant giving up 30-50% of the sale in commissions, competing with the gallery’s other artists, or losing the independence of having a custom branded domain name.
That's when Dan, together with his colleague Zac Halbert, decided to create a streamlined portfolio hosting solution that would bring the best of what the internet could offer artists into a simple, customizable interface that anyone could quickly master. The pair knew they had to create an obstacle-free, turn-key product; one that integrated domain name purchase and hosting, design templates, image uploads, a payment system for selling artwork online, traffic analytic tools, blogging interface and newsletters into a single, easy-to-administer interface. They needed a content management system that would allow their clients to be up and running with a new website quickly, even if the client knew nothing about how to program a shopping website or a promotional blog.
In 2008, Dan and Zac asked RaffSoftware if we could develop the back-end of their website for them. The job was challenging: to take as much of the technical burden off the artist as possible, and to automate everything from domain name purchasing and blogging software to PayPal functionality and mailing lists. We proposed a system that was both flexible and scalable, so that new features could be easily added as the business grew and evolved.
Four weeks after Dan and Zac accepted our proposal, Foliotwist.com was launched and running.
Over the next few months, Foliotwist did indeed grow and evolve. We developed additional customization features so that artists could control in more detail the layout, color and fonts of their sites. And as Foliotwist’s client base grew, we helped Dan and Zac to raise a dedicated server that could manage all the new traffic.
As we continue to work with Foliotwist, what we are most proud of is how we have helped Dan and Zac to meet their goal of removing the technical barriers of the internet so that artists can get on with the business of making art. In the words of one Foliotwist.com client: "It took me 4 months to get my previous website up and going, and really, in about 4 minutes I had art online with Foliotwist."
Case Study: Wireless Orbit Ltd., California, USA
RaffSoftware handled the major part of the development
of our wifi billing software. We were extremely pleased
with the results. They delivered a very high quality
output in a short time frame. We were also impressed by the project management and planning aspect, there
were frequent status meetings and the project went very much according to the plan. Since then we have used
Raff software for various extensions to the project and
we consider them as one of our best vendors.
Rajeev Pokkyarath, Founder of Wireless Orbit
People have come to expect Wi-Fi access wherever they go, and businesses such as hotels, airports, universities, bookstores and even coffee shops are under pressure to provide easy-to-use internet access in order to attract and keep their clientele.
Yet whether the access is free, fee-based or supported by ad revenue, deploying even a small wireless network is difficult for the average business operator. Managing user accounts, monitoring usage, payment and billing, tracking click-through rates and, most importantly, making sure the system is secure, up and running 24/7… these are just some of the many issues wireless operators must face.
Entrepreneur Rajeev Pokkyarath knew the issues were complex, but he saw this complexity as a business opportunity:
What if I could help business operators by creating an easy-to-administer registration and payment gateway for end-users? And what if that same gateway could be used to monitor the wireless system, track usage and send alerts to the hotspot operator when there’s a problem?
It was a solid business plan in the making.
To bring his idea to market, however, Rajeev knew that the system running behind his service would have to be powerful enough to manage multiple languages, multiple billing systems, and provide sophisticated usage and system monitoring; and yet still be simple and straightforward at the front end for both Hotspot operators and their wireless customers.
He contacted several developers to help him build the product and eventually found one, but the resulting system was unreliable.
It was then that Rajeev contacted RaffSoftware. Initially, he asked us to help him fix the faulty system, but it proved to have serious flaws, and we quickly agreed that rebuilding the system from the ground up was the most efficient solution.
We began by talking with Rajeev in detail about how the gateway should function and what the needs of his clients and their end-users would be. Together, we created a new development strategy, which included building a website that would serve as the central administrative and payment gateway from which Rajeev could provide his service, and where hotspot operators could monitor and manage their wireless hardware, and where they could interface with their end-users.
We recommended a PHP/MySQL website supported with the intensive use of Smarty, as well as ‘gettext’ to support the product’s multiple language features. Four months later, the gateway website was up and running and Wireless Orbit’s first customers were signing up.
Wireless Orbit now provides turnkey billing and monitoring gateways to over 350 hotspot operators in sixteen countries worldwide. Here are some of the key features of the gateway system:
- 10-minute set-up for new hotspots operators, with easily-expanded networks
- Fee, free or ad-based revenue models
- Multiple billing options, including credit card, pre-paid cards and accounts, and PayPal
- Multiple language support
- Custom login portals
- Sales and usage statistics
- Bandwidth management
- System monitoring and automated alerts via SMS
For more information, visit www.wirelessorbit.com
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