PICS Helps Marine and Diving Equipment Outfitter Build Attractive, Functional Web Portal

While any "bright" high school student can offer someone a Web presence, it is better to trust an expert to create a true e-commerce site, says Howard Cooper, IT consultant at MAR-VEL. "When we began working on our site, we knew we needed creative people, database experts, and programmers," Cooper says. "We wanted one source for everything, and PICS had what we needed."

PICS has a team of professional designers who can offer companies user-friendly Web sites that are fresh, inviting, and easy to read. But they also have system architects and development experts who focus on the "back end" of Web sites—the engines that make them work. These architects and programmers have extensive experience creating a variety of sophisticated Web applications, e-commerce sites, database-driven sites and Web sites that connect to internal applications. This enables businesses to offer dynamic sites that let customers access current price and availability information, effectively creating an entirely new sales channel with minimal costs.

MAR-VEL took PICS to task: In addition to requiring extensive reporting capabilities, the company needed a site that could handle a complex, multi-level pricing structure and a 60,000-plus item database. Further complicating the project was the fact that only certain customers have access to many restricted items in the company's diving, marine lifesaving and personal protection and tactical equipment catalog. Using extensive online data-driven product and customer administration, along with automated feeds from MAR-VEL's ERP solution, PICS was able to deliver a system that is easy to maintain, based on the complexity of the business environment. The result is a greater ROI with fewer ongoing data-maintenance costs.

Customers have responded, "hitting" the site several thousand times per month. And, since implementing the site, MAR-VEL customer service representatives field fewer calls asking for routine product-related information.

"Many of our customers look at the Web site to research what they want, so the calls we do get now are much more specific," Cooper says.

Cooper says that the Web site is a major contributor to MAR-VEL's growth—the company is five times larger today than it was before a major push that included the Web site's construction. "It's helped us maintain a competitive advantage," he says. "It puts us on a different level."

And would Cooper recommend PICS to another business? "I would, absolutely," he says. "They have the talent to understand a variety of businesses. They're not just techies. They have business expertise, and creative knowledge. It's a great formula for developing a solid site."