September 2015 – jringglass.com

[lexiconnKeymaster]

Website: http://www.jringglass.com/

Description: Forty years ago in 1975, Joseph Ring returned home to Minnesota after an apprenticeship with Leo Popper & Sons, a stained glass studio in New York City.  He set up his own studio and began to build custom stained glass windows.  He also taught classes and sold supplies.  For several years J. Ring Glass Studio specialized in a variety of glass working techniques, including custom beveling, etching, glass bending for antique lamp restoration, glass painting for church windows, mirror re-silvering, and custom stained glass window construction for residential and commercial clients.

Susan and Joe from J. Ring Glass commented that “eventually this diversity became difficult to manage, and the studio stopped all custom work in order to devote all its energy and resources toward the supply business.  Thanks to the development of an internet market presence, the customer base has expanded to a national level with both wholesale and retail buyers.”

Technologies Used: Susan and Joe continued, “J. Ring Glass had its first presence on the internet about ten years ago with a custom made site that did not work well.  We switched to an off the shelf program called OS Commerce but it was not supported and we found it very limited.  Two years ago we contacted Kyle from Merchant Corner about changing to ShopSite.  Kyle and LexiConn worked with us for about six months so that we were able to have our very unique needs fit into the ShopSite platform.

LexiConn was able to direct us to a custom programmer to construct a shipping module to work with our local ground shipping service, which is half the cost of  Fed-Ex or UPS.  We ship a variety of sizes of sheet glass and metals which can be six feet long, so it was a challenge to design an online store that can calculate boxing and shipping charges on demand.  The discounted local shipping charges that we offer has given us a competitive advantage in our five state area and has worked extremely well.

The ShopSite program has given us flexibility and the independence of running our website.  We also rely on the professional and responsive technical support of LexiConn’s support team to help us avoid expensive IT costs.  Additionally, our social media presence on Facebook is very extensive, and we use MailChimp for our direct e-mailings to keep our customers informed.”

Advice / Tips: Susan and Joe finished, “Take your time and do it right.  Test your site well before you go live.”

[Author]

Posts