
Sam, prior to coming up with ideas on how to best design a site for your needs -- I spent some time looking through your current site.
I originally felt like your site was more about telling about your products and listing the dealers -- than TTi actually taking the orders. I believe I came up with that assumption from when I'd spent some time on your site a few years back. However, your site now looks like it wants to tell about your products, list dealers, have appropriate links, photos of customers cars -- but that it also wants to try to sell directly to the customer. However it doesn't have a real catalog or shopping cart. You appear to try to have the prospect fill out a form to email in for a quote -- or to encourage them to call you during your west coast office hours to place an order.
Giving this more thought -- I think you really need an on-line store where a customer can shop, order and pay for on-line -- and the system calculates the sales tax for California orders, calculates shipping, and process the credit card payment on a secure/encrypted site. The system then informs you of the order and prints the pick list and the packing slip. Its Point Of Sale part can also maintain the inventory and perform the standard inventory functions and reports. The customer can check on the status of their current order and review previous orders. Their information is retained and can be be used for Newsletters or coupon offers.
On-line Coupon codes can be set up for a either a percentage of fixed dollar amount -- and have minimum order amounts and/or maximum limit of the coupon value. You set the term of the offer -- and then can give the coupon code on your printed material, to Mopar/Racing Clubs and web sites; or in a newsletter to prior customers and those who signed up for it.
This page you are now on would be the main entry page of the site where you would have your company intro, current applicable news and announcements, and sell the visitor to further investigate the web site and catalog.
There are literally dozens of boxes you can have over on the right. You can have custom web pages (like the one I put up for the ZenCart Reference Book), and organize the catalog in a very logical way.
I feel pretty certain this type of site, while much more complicated for me to set up than the one we had discussed -- and a little more complicated for someone to maintain (although I've taught non-programmers to do that) -- it goes a lot further towards allowing people to place and pay for their orders on-line at their convenience, and for you to more efficiently and professionally process and track those orders. Once my part is done -- maintaining the store (adding categories, products, changing prices, creating coupon codes, replenishing inventory, etc...) is pretty easy to learn -- and doesn't require any programming. If y'all rather -- I can have my assistant deal with adding new products to your catalog on a time basis.
I'd want to host it on my server as it is fast, I'm familiar with, and I know that it has the tools already installed server side that I know this site would need. The sites are backup nightly and daily, weekly, and monthly backups are retained. The sites are mirrored on two drives with RAID1 that has a battery backup -- which is the type or protection an on-line store should have. I would be able to complete this in about 60 hours on my site while your current stay remains where it is -- then it is a simple matter of having your domain change its name server to point to my server.
I did a handful of these sites a few years back, but got away from the because of how time consuming it was for me to set up -- vs. the time I had available to create them. However, I'm about ready to jump back into doing this type of sites again, and would be willing to do yours for half what I use to charge -- and plan to charge in the future -- because I need one recognizable (as I specialize in car and racing sites) customer that I can point to as an example. I think it will be an offer you can't refuse.
I've spent about 12 hours on this to give you a good idea -- of the look and feel. Give me a call when you get a chance and we can talk about it -- and then I can set up and admin login for you and your computer person -- and I can walk y'all through a demo of the administrative functions.
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