Services for schools

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About the London borough of Hounslow

The London borough of Hounslow overseas and manages a vast array of services, they also offer many digital services including services for schools.

Services for schools

The Services for Schools site is used by heads of schools to order services direct from the borough of Hounslow. Simplicity of ordering while getting over some very complex pricing structures was the key to this project's success.

"Creating the e-commerce system to offer the huge flexibility they needed, while keeping it super easy to use for heads of schools who have a million and one things on, was by far the most rewarding part of this site." - Vince Rowe, London Design Works.

Now THAT'S a spreadsheet!

As we are sure is the case with many companies that deal in similar sectors, a lot of the pricing structure for the school services was based on a large number of factors. And at the time the only true way to work out a cost was to load "the spreadsheet". Luckily we were able to help evolve this into the automated pricing system now in place on the site.

Dynamic pricing. While taking in over 10 different key pricing metrics per school we were able to fully automate the pricing system, so when a school logs into the site all the prices update on the fly and flow through from the purchase phase all the way down into the monthly sales reports. One complex system, simplified.

Drupal e-commerce

We used the Drupal e-commerce system as the core of the new site. This gives everyone at the borough the power and control needed of a fully fledged e-commerce system, while offering the ease of use of the Drupal content management system.

Great results. We have had many different things said about the new site, from team members at Hounslow through to schools themselves. And the main item is always simplicity. It just works!