March 2009 – mlcswoodworking.com

[AnonymousParticipant]

Website: http://www.mlcswoodworking.com/

Description: MLCS Woodworking, Ltd. is a family-owned and operated business that has been serving the woodworking community for 30 years. The company provides router bits, shaper cutters, router tables and woodworking accessories to hobbiests and professionals alike with great prices, excellent customer service, and helpful technical support. Chris of MLCS Woodworking states, “From its humble beginnings in our owner’s basement, the company has expanded to a 20-person business serving the USA and beyond via our mail order catalog, website, and Woodworkers’ Showroom/Outlet store in Huntingdon Valley, PA.”

Technologies Used: He went on to state, “We have been using the ShopSite e-commerce platform since beginning our e-commerce venture in the late 1990s. After a brief time (and problems) with another hosting company, we switched to LexiConn and have always been extremely pleased with their prompt and helpful service, from the time of their seamless transfer of our store onward.

We first chose ShopSite for its easy-to-use non-technical interface and “Order Anywhere” feature, which allowed our catalog and web designer to create completely customized web pages while still utilizing an E-commerce Order button functionality.

Gradually over time, we have added more interactive user features to our site, with assistance from many helpful ShopSite Add-on Modules provided by LexiConn. The Order Status module allows us to easily give our customers immediate access to their Order Status and shipping data, especially after LexiConn assisted with setting up a bulk data upload. Our new Customer Forums, powered by PHPBB, allow our customers to interact with each other and also allowed our first ever Best Project Contest with user voting. We’ve also added the ShopSite Review Module, allowing our customers to share ratings and feedback on our products. Most recently, we added LivePerson Live Help code to our site to allow us to provide immediate online assistance to our website visitors.

We’re also pleased to provide our customers with a great wealth of instructional materials, with a library of PDF instruction sheets and, more recently, instructional videos fed through to our web pages from our accounts on YouTube and Google Video.

After a major site update and modernization with Drop-Down and Accordion menus a year or so ago, we’ve spent more time utilizing and customizing built-in ShopSite features, from the Tell-a-Friend feature and Customer Registration to the shopping cart templates. The custom template option in ShopSite lets us use all the ShopSite features while creating a visual appearance that suits the look and feel of our site.

Though our site still uses the Order Anywhere function primarily, we are beginning to develop and utilize Custom Page and Product templates, such as for our yearly Holiday Gift Guide pages. Using these templates, we are able to make a site that can be quickly and easily updated, as our site has grown to nearly 2000 products and over 100 pages, but still maintain great control over the appearance.

We’ve also added a number of third-party JavaScripts to our site for additional visual appeal and functionality. We utilize the Google Custom Site search as our site’s primary internal search engine.”

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