We have a website at: www.ProAudioLA.com
Primarily, our business revolves around custom cabling for professional audio applications. Our website is hosted on Volusion.
While we have many products that offer various options for the buyer to configure their cables (some options affect price while others don’t), we are looking for a way to implement a custom cable application to our site whereby a customer could literally step by step design their own cable or multi-channel snakes. This means they could choose a cable category, specify a specific cable type (manufacturer’s of cables have many cable types… we predominantly use two brands of cable and about twenty varieties of cable within those brands), then specify what connector type and specific connector they require on either end of the cable. In the case of “multi-channel snakes,” they would be able to configure each channel either one at a time for full customization, or all connectors on one side in one fell swoop. Then obviously they would be able to also select the length of their custom cable as well as color choice (if the particular cable type is offered in various colors).
These choices as the customer moves along through the process of selecting the various aspects are dynamic — meaning that toggling the first choice (i.e. individual cable vs. multi-channel snake) leads to the second selection updating the choices available and so on.
For a perfect example of something similar to what we’re trying to replicate, please refer to: http://www.redco.com/shopdisplayproducts.asp?id=126&cat=Design+Your+Own+Custom+Cable
This site defines the custom cable industry in terms of allowing the user to configure a cable or snake in any way they wish.
While this redco website’s version is functional and certainly commendable, we are looking to implement a similar program on our website that improves the buying experience for our customers. These improvements would include providing better visual feedback of the selections made as well as information on the choice of cables and the reasons to use one vs. another for a particular application.
Basically, we love their concept, but we want to refine it to be just a step better.
I’m not sure how this can be accomplished, but it’s been suggested to me by one programmer that a link that takes the user outside of Volusion, allows them to go through a similar process to what is linked to above on Redco’s site, and then return to our shopping cart with the custom built item and a price in their cart would likely be the manner in which to accomplish this goal. Perhaps there are other approaches to be taken.
Obviously, to accomplish this we will need to work with a programmer to provide the information required to implement such an idea including the information for dynamically updating variables, price points for the base products, and additive information for selecting specific options.
We are anxious to find a programmer who has a fantastic idea for tackling this for our company and our budget is flexible depending on what the concept might be and the ability to execute something tidy, effective, functional, and fun to use… read: an improvement on the www.Redco.com concept.
I look forward to hearing from all of you programming geniuses. With the right idea and the know how to implement this idea, we are ready to work with the right programmer to achieve this initiative.
Regards,
Jason Hanan
President
Pro Audio LA, LLC
www.ProAudioLA.com
