Charity merchandising using TeaCommerce and Umbraco

We’ve been working with Sports Leaders UK for many years, and I’ve written about some of the interesting projects we’ve undertaken with them.  Today I want to focus on how we enable Sports Leaders to raise thousands of pounds every month through selling merchandise using TeaCommerce and Umbraco.

Using TeaCommerce for Sports Leaders UK 

Sports Leaders UK were looking for an online shop tool that would enable them to advertise their clothing merchandise to existing schools and Learners.  In the shops original incarnation, the site simply showed pictures of available stock with a downloadable PDF to be printed and sent with a cheque.  Delivery costs were high discouraging Learners from buy small quantities, and the entire process was cumbersome.

Using TeaCommerce, a paid for ecommerce plugin for Umbraco, we developed a shop that met their immediate business needs.  

Key requirements for success were:

• Integrated into Umbraco for ease of editing stock inventory and managing orders;
• Payment by credit card and PayPal;
• PCI compliance;
• Mechanism for offline payments for schools without credit cards;
• Ability for groups of buys to order separately but share a single deliver to a shared address;
• Integration with fulfillment warehouse.

As standard TeaCommerce installs as an integral part of Umbraco and product inventory is stored as content in the CMS - this gives a great deal of flexibility as to data stored about products and in rendering that content as the designers see fit, making Conversion Rate Optimisation of product pages super easy.

TeaCommerce has a number of payment provider modules making credit card payment easy.  Our provider of choice is SagePay which is very easy to integrate with.  One of the great aspects of SagePay is the level of fraud protection and risk management that is available by default, enabling us to make CV2, postcode and 3D Secure validation mandatory, as well as more complex risk assessment tools such as The 3rd Man.

Depending on how you integrate SagePay and TeaCommerce PCI compliance comes very simply as we never hold and credit card details in the ecommerce site.

As a large number of Sports Leaders UK’s customers are schools without company credit cards, a mechanism for offline payment was critical.  TeaCommerce includes a very simple Default payment provider capable of generating an invoice.  We then provided workflow to enable Sports Leaders Merchandising managers to match up offline payments and release orders for fulfillment.

Sports Leaders work with a warehousing fulfillment company who pick, pack and ship orders.  We developed a bespoke module for TeaCommerce which runs twice daily to identify all new Completed orders and compiles a batch file of orders which are then sent via SFTP to the warehouse for shipping, which reduced double keying by Merchandising Managers.

The Sports Leaders Shop has run for several years, enabling the charity to raise thousands of pounds every month to support their work delivering leadership qualifications for young people.