About Ohio Living Store

Ohio Living is a wide-reaching nonprofit organization in Ohio state which operates around 20 retirement communities providing them services from independent living and assisted living to rehabilitation and long-term care. They needed help to build an internal e-commerce store for their employees. This store would serve 20 different communities with 20 different product catalogs – all through one website. The shop interface needed to have community-specific homepages and slider banners. They also needed to build an extension that will accommodate multiple users and sub-accounts within a master account for order approval/rejection.

How we did it

  1. Building an employee e-commerce portal that would retain its community-specific individuality and product catalog
  2. Create an order approval extension

  1. We proposed to build the website with a multi-store view that allows the customer to switch to different stores for different catalog using a store switcher
  2. We changed the flow of the existing multi-user extension to allow sub-accounts to place an order and then prompt order approval request to the admin

  1. We could avoid creating multiple websites for multiple communities. A multi-store view achieved the purpose best.
  2. The extension has a frontend approval feature that showcases all the orders waiting for approval and the list of items in an order. This makes it easy for the parent customer to approve or reject an order.

MULTI-STORE VIEW

To be able to accommodate 20 stores in one website while retaining their identities, we created a multi-store view with a feature to switch between different stores using a store switcher. This was achieved by customizing the Ultimo theme in such a way that each store has a community-specific UI with eye-catching graphics. Each store can be accessed and managed by the admin from one panel.

SMOOTH ORDERING FUNCTIONALITY

The extension needed to accommodate multiple users and sub-accounts under the same master account, but with different user permissions. A user needs to sign up at the private shop and on approval from the parent account, would be cleared to place orders. However, the parent account will hold the authority to accept or reject this order. Codaemon changed the flow of the multi-user extension so that it allowed the sub-account to complete the order without sending an order approval request on checkout. Instead, it sends an order approval request after the order is placed. This ensures a smooth ordering experience for the employees. We built a frontend approval feature for the extension which displays:
  1. the lists of orders pending approval
  2. the items in each order 
This makes it easy for the parent user to approve or reject any order.

PERIODIC INVOICING

A unique feature of the extension is its periodic invoicing functionality. It allows an employee to pay for an item in regularly scheduled installments. The user can select the duration of the installment payment period. Accordingly, an automated invoice will be emailed to them on every due date till the payment completion of the total amount. For example, if the user chooses to pay every 2 months, the invoice of the installment amount will be sent to them every two months until the completion of the payment.

Our Clients