This Spring marks the 10th anniversary of the launch of CU Ecommerce. This is the service that allows units on campus to take money for events and services without having to resort to finding their own third-party provider.
The CU Ecommerce was built by our senior web developer, Mike Corkum, back at the end of 2012. After a few pilot projects, the service went live in the Spring of 2013. We had one client to start with (appropriately enough it was the Sprott School of Business). Since then we have helped 150 clients. As we speak we have 85 clients and the system has transacted nearly $15 million.
None of this could have been possible without the collaboration of those clients on campus who not only needed an ecommerce service but who worked with us to push its boundaries and functions to build a much more complex set of functionalities than we started with all that time ago. It seems unreal that it could be ten years ago, when it feels like ten minutes.
Speaking of ten minutes, that is not the amount of lead time you need to give us if you would like an ecommerce site set up for you. Our official lead time is 4 weeks, although we can spin things up faster than that if required. But once you have submitted a form to request the CU Ecommerce service, we cannot simply press a button to make things happen. The steps that follow include:
- we have to meet to hear about your requirements
- and you have to hear about the service to see if it fits the bill for you
- we need to outline the price associated with operating an ecommerce instance at Carleton
- you need to provide the fields for your form(s)
- in addition, you need to provide text for the page the form sits on as well as the email notifications sent to your customers and
- text for the refunds page which is an absolutely mandatory requirement
Even after the forms and pages are built, there is still testing and bug-fixing to go through. You can see why asking for an ecommerce event the day before you want to start advertising it to the world. Thankfully we now have an ecommerce checklist for you when you want to request the service.
We will be talking about refund policies in a fresh news story very soon to help outline your own. However, you still need to provide this to us before your ecommerce page goes live. If you don’t we will decide the refund policy for you, and believe me, we are way more generous with your money than we are with our own.
If you would like to engage Web Services around ecommerce you can consult the Ecommerce Checklist to get started. And remember: filling out this form is the way to request the service.