Computer Wholesale

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Introduction

Computer Wholesale NSW sells a large number of technology products to a variety of customers located all over Australia. Products are purchased from a variety of suppliers using disparate systems so management of product and price information has been difficult in the past.

Overview

The project required the development of several applications and commissioning of a webserver with SSL to manage the transaction processing. System requirements included:

• Ability to handle over 25,000 products and 10,000 website hits per month
• Allow customers to register, order and pay for products online
• Gather product data and images from various sources and update using the lowest comparable price
• Calculate discounted sell prices on predefined minimum margins by category and value
• Fully automated product update process
• Live Help

The data acquisition applications gather information from various sources including; FTP, Email and HTTP. Of particular interest is extracting data from supplier websites, this involved the development of automated robots which trawl a website gathering data and images for upload to the Computer Wholesale website.

During the website update process the application automatically compares stock availability and prices to ensure that the best prices are always offered to customers.

http://www.computerwholesale.com.au