Newcastle Web Design - Eco Remedy Case Study

October 27, 2020

Data Fidelity was approached to build a simple, scalable, carbon-neutral E-commerce website.
Newcastle Web Design

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Di had started her home-based business, Eco Remedy, last year. Her goal was to create handmade, artisan products for the home & bathroom. She had been operating at the Lilydale farmers market for some time, selling products to other locals which she had made by hand. These were products such as soaps, toothpaste, deodorant, as well as raw materials for making homemade cleaning & sanitary products. A brilliant, unique business which had values aligned with Data Fidelity – to operate a carbon-neutral business, to educate others in our respective industries on methods that can be used to operate in a sustainable, ethical, equitable manner, while still delivering a service on-par or better with other businesses. Di had decided to expand her business outside of the Lilydale markets, by running an E-commerce store which can ship Australia-wide. Operating at the local weekend markets is a fantastic way to start a unique, artisan business, and Di had worked very hard to get her business off the ground, getting to meet a lot of locals along the way. But to grow the business, she had to be able to reach people Australia-wide; hence the need for a website. Data Fidelity was contracted to build an E-commerce store, with the following goals:

1) Build an E-commerce store from scratch, which can be easily navigable and manageable for site administrators
2) Build a number of highly customizable product variations including products sold by weight, dynamic (multi-buy) discounts, bulk buy or weight quantity-based discounts
3) Input automated postage calculations, create product vouchers such as flat rate shipping, free shipping, or local pickup options

4) Install & configure carbon-neutral, robust website hosting within Australia, including setting up Email integration with the E-commerce website
5) Explain in great detail how to process orders placed via the website, update product pricing, variations and vouchers
6) Automatic daily site backups which can be quickly deployed.

For Web Design Newcastle

The first step with delivering the project, was to create a WordPress website, & install the basic plugins.

Di was unsure about which way to go with her website, as a myriad of recommendations were provided to her, for a number of different ways of building a website, from writing one from scratch, to using a very basic web builder. We explained to Di about the benefits of using WordPress over another website framework (Such as Wix or SquareSpace) from both a robustness, and scalability perspective.

Unlike other website builders, WordPress in its most basic form, is a pre-configured series of HTML, CSS, PHP and SQL files which form a very basic blog website. However, due to being open-source & very popular, the enormous number of Plugins created by the global developer community have infinitely improved its usability for any amount of website cases. For Eco Remedy, we have used an incredibly powerful & customizable plugin, Woocommerce, to deliver what Di needed for her website. WooCommerce is a freely available, open-source add-on for WordPress websites. In simple terms, what this means is that WordPress can be modified & customized at the extent of which its fundamental code languages can be.

Data Fidelity had recommended WooCommerce for Eco Remedy, based on the requirements needed for Eco Remedy products.

Some products were sold on a simple basis, such as compostable Toothbrushes, were sold on a per-item basis.
Some products were sold on a per-weight basis, such as Borax, requiring a weight option added to some products.
Eco Remedy was still operating at the Lilydale markets, and customers needed the option to purchase goods online & pickup from the markets on a Sunday, if they wanted to save on shipping.
Newcastle Web Design

Di was satisfied that Data Fidelity had delivered the additional scope of works, as well as some additional hours spent going through how WooCommerce works, how to add & edit product variations, and how to process orders. However, some months after the website had gone live, an unexpected amount of site traffic had overloaded the hosting setup, requiring the site to be rebooted. Data Fidelity was able to set up an Autoscaling solution for Eco Remedy via GCP. This meant that depending on the total network traffic incoming to Eco Remedy, if there is a sudden influx of web traffic the site will automatically reconfigure. This is based on a series of preconfigured hosting options set up by Data Fidelity. In simple terms, if the site has ten visitors one hour, and then two thousand the next, the site will remain online without requiring a manual reboot. In addition to this, some months later the site was subject to a random DoS (Denial-Of-Service) attack, intentionally causing network congestion preventing customers from visiting the site. Data Fidelity was able to set up & configure WordFence, a utility used for WordPress to automatically block IP addresses when a cyber attack is identified, preventing any data breach, downtime, or other cyber attacks. Since this was configured, there have been over 1,500 unsuccessful cyber attacks on Eco Remedy, with zero data breaches. Newcastle Web Design

Built to be unique, special, and environmentally friendly.

Fundamentally, Eco Remedy is an Australian owned & operated artisan business, with no other business like it. What is often overlooked with web-based applications or sites, is the carbon that is produced by the data centres hosting these applications. If the power consumption of every internet connected device were to be combined, it is larger than 10% of the world’s global energy consumption. Data Fidelity was able to ensure that the core values of this project were aligned with Eco Remedy, by ensuring that hosting was 100% carbon neutral via Google Cloud’s Sustainability policy; as well as Data Fidelity’s own practices being aligned with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) for our operations. We were very privileged to have had the opportunity to work with Di on this project, and we hope that Eco Remedy will continue to operate for years to come. Newcastle Web Design

Is your business requiring an E-commerce website like Eco Remedy? Contact Us today! today!Newcastle Web Design

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