An old, established company, GMS had to have a way to bring their excellent customer service and parts offering to the web, which was difficult as a big part of what they do is help people find the right part for the right model.
Our team brought together the best of all our services. With a new, professional design, a backend database to support the range of models and parts, and a cool Parts Browser on the website, GMS is turning heads and attracting new business with this great new site.
Be sure to visit www.gmsparts.com to see the site in action.
The "wow" factor on this site has to be the parts browser. In a three-step process, you choose a Manufacturer, which then makes the next dropdown menu live and you choose the Model, then that gives you a final list of types of products that are available for that model.
This one innovation has made it much easier for customers to find what they want from a complex database. Along with more traditional, easy to follow navigation, our HTML team did a great job of tying together the look the graphic designers presented with the programming team's functionality.
Taking information from GMS' old database and getting it into a usable format was no easy challenge. It's not that they didn't have data (although we ran into that as well), but the data relationships between Manufacturer, Model and Part are a huge mess of cross-references.
Our team pulled the data in and then provided one of the coolest, backend interfaces we've built to date. It allows taking a single part and quickly associating it with multiple models, which, in turn, are quickly associated with manufacturers.
Honestly, Conquent got the project because GMS had been working with another company who simply couldn't figure out a way to do this. Although a challenge, our team was able to get it done, and it works beautifully, and completely automatically as the GMS staff continues to enter new parts.
