OpenHighStreet is a new concept to make it easier for Herefordshire residents to buy from the plethora of Herefordshire retailers and producers. Local shops can list locally produced items and then OpenHighStreet co-ordinate's the delivery, so they're sent directly to you in one single delivery.
The Pilot Website
The pilot emerged from a Unilever lead consortium formed in 2011 by Unilever, Inzenka, Sequoia, Pi Global & eziserv. With funding from the Government's Technology Strategy Board OpenHighStreet needed to get the pilot live as soon as possible.
We were approached along with several other web development companies to build an e-commerce website with a design that was easy to use and was appealing to the local community.
On discussing their aims and objectives, we agreed that the fastest way to get the pilot up and running would be to follow the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) strategy we use on our own products and services.
uCommerce (the e-commerce platform we use) was a perfect fit for this as it offers much of the functionality OpenHighStreet required out-of-the-box and we could easily incorporate the missing functionality.
One of the great things about combining Umbraco and uCommerce is the extensibility they offer which means we can not only quickly prove the concept but also add functionality as it's required.
One of the main differences with OpenHighStreet and a standard e-commerce website is the way products were listed. OpenHighStreet needed to be grouped by category (this is standard) but they also needed the products to be listed by retailer as well. We combined this logic so even when listing products by type, the retailer was clearly displayed.
Customers responded well to the pilot (which ended at the end of 2012) and OpenHighStreet received a lot of interest from other counties keen to roll out similar functionality. We're looking forward to phase 2 and rolling it out further.
