The PartsDirect.ru web-portal is built on the basis of a standard dia$par client web-UI.
The portal sports cutting-edge functionality which may even be well ahead of what’s out there at the moment. Orders placed by the client are routed online into the central database to book the products. The website provides the most complete and up-to-date display of products and info on how many items are available and at which warehouse at the moment. My account allows users to browse their order history, make changes to their current orders, and view the progress of their requests, while corporate clients are provided with a complete set of tools to enable them to process bookkeeping documentation on their own (agreements, powers of attorney, pro forma invoices, commercial invoices, and shipping lists — you can do all this on your own and print stuff out right from the website). You can have partial shipments, work separately on agreements and invoices, arrange shipments on credit terms for dealers, manage deliveries, as well as manage text-message and email notifications. Navigation through the website, which works based on the properties of commodity classifiers, is governed by the settings within the interface of the central database. That’s where descriptions are put together as well.
Internet acquiring, electronic money, integration with courier services – all this will become available once the client is ready to launch these services.
Quite simply, there are tons of features available, including state-of-the-art SEO functionality. Just a week into the launch of the website, and search engines are already showing it to target visitors lured in by the names of items the website offers.
Moreover, in the case of PartsDirect.ru the functionality of the standard solution has been limited artificially – a newly-launched business (We at Humanless, by the way, are pretty sure that in less than a year they’ll become a nationwide leader within their segment [UPD December, 2011: the company goes top of the league]) just doesn’t need all those additional fancy features, like complex self-controlled loyalty programs, fully standalone MLM networks, advanced access control lists, and other gimmicks sought after by large businesses — whose successful implementation can be illustrated through the example of the ulmart.ru online store (that’s an astounding several hundred million dollars in annual turnover, if you want to talk about recognized leaders).
Fancy that. Just 61 days (work started in late June, 2010; the website launched in early September, 2010) and a perfectly reasonable price-tag (not disclosed at the client’s request). Yet, Russia, clearly, is not America. There’s no profusion of VC funds and business angels out here, so start-ups rarely get millions invested in them.
