Dinku

Industry
Ecommerce
Location
Nigeria
Partnership period
2015 – 2019
Team size
6
Project information
Overview
Dinku is an e-commerce website. The peculiarity is that it provides users the ability to purchase goods at discounted prices with the price-locking feature.

Our Task
Generally, the work we faced was rather easy–we needed to create an E-commerce solution to sell goods and offer deals. The trick was in price-locking – the item has the retail price and the discounted prices that users can lock.
Usually, when it comes to eCommerce, business owners often face some challenges:
- Website. It needs to load fast. Otherwise, potential clients will lose patience and go to other websites.
- Security. “Young” websites often get hacked in order to receive clients’ personal and payment data. Business owners look for the most secure solutions.
- Multichannel shopping. Nowadays, customers are used to certain digital comfort, i.e., using one account for everything. So integrations with media shopping platforms like Facebook are almost crucial.
- Payment and shipping. It is important to have a safe database to store clients’ payment information, manage payments, get reports from the system, and integrate the shipping service.
- Think mobile. A website is great for e-commerce, but there are still plenty of people who prefer to buy via their smartphones or tablets. Business owners need to keep that in mind before launching their solution.
We kept that in mind while working on this project. It was decided that the website had to consist of the following sections:
- Homepage
- Separate page for each category (initially 8 of them)
- Offer a deal
- Search
- Cart
- Sign in (unregistered users) / My profile (registered users)
To the client’s requirements, only registered users can purchase items on the website. Thus, any unregistered user could search the website and view the goods, but to purchase anything, they had to undergo the registration process. Additionally, the solution required the Admin panel to be managed by the admin user.
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Implementation

Core Functionality
The main page contains the menu bar in the header, a clickable categories list, and contact information. All users can click any of the categories—the new page with available items will open, showing their retail prices and the deal price, which is changing randomly from retail price to minimal deal price each second (values are set in the admin panel). When users see the price they like, they can click the “Lock price” button. The page also includes advertisements and a slider with several constantly changing images that lead to certain pages when clicked.
Here, on the main page, all users can offer a deal. If they have something they want to sell, they can fill it out and submit a special form on the website. The system will validate all the required fields, and if everything is correct, the item will appear among other products.
By clicking any suggested category on the main page, users get a list of goods, including their retail prices and deal prices. Registered users click the “Lock price” button, Cart page uploads. After the item is locked, the text “The deal is gone!” is indicated, and the item moves to the locked items section at the bottom of the page. The cart page indicates the item, locked price, shipping price, and period, as well as add another item / delete item options. Items can be locked for 30 minutes. During this time, the payment and checkout should be made. Otherwise, the item returns back to the list of items, and the price starts changing randomly again. Users can lock only one product at a time. While 30 minutes are not out or the purchase is not made, other products won’t be available for the user to lock.

Checkout and Delivery
The checkout process is simple—users need to provide their information:
- First name
- Last name
- Address
- Phone number
The system also indicates the locations where shipping is currently available. Users have two payment options: Pay On Delivery (POD) or Quickteller. If payment isn’t completed in 30 minutes, the popup is closed. The item returns back to the list of items, price starts changing randomly again. After payment is made successfully, the order appears in the admin panel in the “View orders list” with “Sold” status, and the payment status is “Successful.” The system sends a notification email to the email address that the user has indicated in his Account Details (Making an order). If payment failed for any reason, the order appears in the “View orders list” with “Payment Failed” status, payment status is “Failed”.
All registered users have accounts where they can edit personal information, shipping information, and change passwords. This information automatically fills in the fields on the checkout page. Any user can get help or ask for the information in the live chat that is provided on every page that was integrated with the LiveChat API.

Admin Panel
The admin panel is regulated by the Admin users, who manage the following sections:
Users
First Name, Last Name, and Email columns contain search text fields. All columns have an option for sorting items in ascending/descending order by clicking on a column name. The gender column has a drop list to filter the results (Female/Male/All. All is a default option). The birthday column has a filter to select a date or a date range (indicating them on calendars).
Orders, Admins, and Products
Admin users are responsible for providing information about each item. These are edited in the admin panel:
- Product name, description and features
- The category it belongs to
- Product types and the amount left
- Vendor details and rating
- Retail and deal prices
- Shipping time and price
- Related images
Content Pages, Email Templates, and Offered Deals
Offers that haven’t been reviewed yet are highlighted. By default, the rating of not reviewed offers is set to the good. The business name, contact person, and email columns contain search text fields. All columns have an option for sorting items in ascending/descending order by clicking on a column name. The category column has a drop list to filter the results. The rating column has a drop list to filter the results (All/Excellent/Very good/Good/Poor/Bad. All is a default option). The offer sent column has a filter to select the date or a date range (indicating them on calendars).
Result
An e-commerce site with a unique price-locking discount feature
The website started working in 2017 in one country with almost 300 active users, 30 vendors, and around 5,000 items to sell.

Services
- Web Development
- Quality Assurance
- UX/UI Design
- Project Management
- Business Analysis
Team
- Front-end developer
- Back-end developer
- UX/UI designer
- Project manager
- Business analyst
- QA specialist
Technology stack
- Zend 2 Framework
- PHP
- MySQL
- Twitter Bootstrap
- HTML/CSS
- JavaScript
- Quickteller API
- Live Chat API
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