As the online sales market continues to grow with the spread of faster internet connections, many companies are venturing online for the first time. In order to open up these new markets it is essential to be focussed and well informed. We place an emphasis on the right database system and flexible applications to connect our clients products to new customers internationally.
Acidy focus on the experience of the end user - both the customer and the member of staff. The Yak e-commerce engine offers sophisticated intuitive web-based management and a welcoming customer-facing element, which encourages new users while rewarding the loyalty of returning customers with personalised incentives and a dynamically configurable environment.
Using Yak - our e-commerce engine, we are able to create flexible lightweight e-commerce applications tailored to very specific requirements. This enables:
user-friendly browsing with multi track hierarchies
personalised user experience in multiple languages and currencies
express ordering, securely stored addresses and credit-card details.
previous order management
customer tracking, multi-level user visibility, loyalty schemes
complex shipping calculations
a comprehensive administration interface tailored to the client's working practices - allowing full web-based business management
as well as any other features required by our clients' specific circumstances and requirements.
Context Aware
Yak uses intelligent data and session context objects to allow the user to browse and modify the database. By analysing the database structure when first accessed, it can build up a picture of the relationships between data and the paths that users will take through your database. The engine knows which database record or object the user is currently interested in, and will interpret requests for data with this in mind. This allows the template designers to take a step back from the internal workings of the database and concentrate on the interface design.
Templates
The core of the Yak presentation system is a set of templates. These are unique to each Yak application, and instruct the engine to retrieve information from the database, execute complex functions and peform user-specific formatting or actions. Templates can be nested, meaning that other templates can be referenced from within the current one and included in the output. Yak generated pages are built up by several of these templates, starting at a root template dynamically selected for each request. Thanks to Yak's context aware data model, templates can be re-used much more flexibly than static pages forming a very concise presentation layer. Since the templates react to the data a single set of templates can produce many different outputs.
On top of this the templates are themselves context-aware, reacting differently depending on who requests the information. This means, for example, that American users may see a Thanksgiving theme while their European counterparts may see Christmas greetings.
Pictures & Files
You can easily attach multiple files and pictures to any data record with Yak, which will even automatically resize your pictures for the web and create thumbnails to improve your users experience. These file or pictures can be referenced from the templates to dynamically generate complex and interactive webpages.
Security
Yak can support thousands of users, each with unique permissions and abilities. Users are also arranged in groups, with group permissions affecting all their members. All sensitive information is encrypted before being saved to the database, and Yak also supports SSL encryption for all communications with the client including file uploads.
Acidy have many years experience in helping businesses to grow online - see our First Ireland case study for further information.
