Mills Ltd is a distributor of  specialist tooling, cable management products and general hardware for the telecoms industry. Originally established as an engineering distributor in 1918, Mills has changed with the times and continues to do so.

Activate Media has been Mill’s e-commerce partner for 10 years, developing its first online store before online ordering was even on the map for most companies. The original store served the company well over the years, but with a massive product portfolio and increasing monthly sales, Mills contacted us about developing a Web 2.0 version of their site.

The Brief

Over the years, Mills built a list of enhanced features they wanted for the next generation of their website. The main features of the brief were as follows:

• A state-of-the-art catalogue and shopping cart system to cater and handle the massively increased product catalogue
  
• Online accounts for their clients, including invoice management and online invoicing
  
• integration to the back end systems of their SAGE 200 accounting platform, allowing for live stock control, fulfilment information, order processing, and customer financial information
  
• Improve the communication flow between the client base and the company

The Activate Solution

This project required a full architecture change to the existing site, as all product and availably data for the website would be supplied by the Sage 200 system, and all order information from the website would be fed back into the sage system for processing, all in real time. We worked with Mills and their SAGE partner to create an active data exchange programme which allows for seamless integration between the Sage accounts system and the Website.

Once this exchange architecture was agreed, Activate set about creating a rich new catalogue and shopping cart system based on its tried and tested core system, integrating the feature set specified by Mills. Some of the features of the new system are: powerful and fast product selection tools, active shopping cart total, ability to offer special website promotions and discounts and user generated “rate a product”.

Activate built this site using the latest best practices for W3c compliance and search engine optimization.

Finally, we integrated our powerful List Management and Newsletter System into the administration system of the site for sending out their weekly newsletter and other promotional e-mailings.

In building the new Mills ltd. site, Activate Media utilised the following core software:

• Activate CMS that allows full control of all aspects of the website
• Activate Catalogue and Shopping cart featuring real time data exchange tools
• Activate CRM and Newsletter system