Interview: ShoeBacca.com

Tell us a bit about yourself and ShoeBacca.com?

I formed Focus Media LLC about a year ago as a boutique development and SEO company. During that process, I was introduced to the owners of ShoeBacca.com as they had a substantial eBay presence but no web property of their own. We wanted to deliver a really fun different type of site with extremely cool advanced features. That led us to Magento.

What technologies are currently implemented / integrated in the frontend and behind-the-scenes?

First and foremost, I would like to give a huge thanks to Amanda Nelson from 7 Design Group for her amazing design. From the front-end the only additional technology is Adobe’s Scene7 image viewer. For the backend, we have employed Joomla for additional CMS control, and ServiceObjects for AMAZING address validation and address correction.

Why did you choose Magento for the project?

We were really attracted to the feature rich administration panel and Ajax product display. The closer for me personally was the seamless one page checkout which I love.

What other solutions did you consider and/or evaluate?

We looked at ZenCart as an alternative but found it lacking in too many areas. The only other option we considered was building our own shopping cart with virtually no features.

What are your plans for the future with the site?

Foremost is product development, throughout the beta process we will be adding youth products and apparel. We will also be taking advantage of the promotional capabilities in Magento. Lastly and most importantly, we will be running huge promotions and giving away a lot of shoes!

Any recommendations for people evaluating Magento?

As this site [ShoeBacca.com] is enterprise level, we are running 2 web servers with load balancing and a separate DB server. We saw tremendous increases in page load times when we moved the DB to a dedicated server. Of course anything you can do to increase caching is great.

Any final words of wisdom?

I would like to thank the entire Magento team for the hard work you all have done. This is clearly the cutting edge shopping cart system available. To sum it up in one word IMPRESSIVE. I have been very fortunate to be surrounded by a wonderful team of developers and designers and that is always the recipe for success!