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Capitol Media returns Pike Place Fish Market to UltraCart
Written by Robert Landis.
In October of 2016, a long-standing client of UltraCart and Capitol Media (over 10 years) Pike Place Fish Market (PPFM) notified us that they would be transitioning to a new development team and shopping cart platform. Although disappointed, we helped to ensure a smooth transition to the new development team.
The new agency immediately began work on designing and developing a new website. They recommended that PPFM use Shopfiy. They chose Shopfiy to take advantage of the Shopify Point of Sale system providing PPFM the option to take in-store orders using ipads.
The new website went live in early February of 2017. Within 3 weeks, the fish mongers discovered that using ipads to take orders literally broke their sales process. The mongers were spending too much time looking at their ipad’s rather then scanning the crowd for new customers.
By early March, they abandoned Shopify and began using Ultrcart for all in-store sales. All on-line orders continued to be processed at Shopify.
Around this time, PPFM invited Capitol Media to reassume control of their new website. Needless to say, we were ecstatic!
The mongers were also frustrated with Shopfiy’s on-line ordering process. They found it to be impossible to modify orders once initiated and frequent error messages caused a lot of confusion.
Capitol Media’s first order of business was to decide which system would prevail since running two shopping carts was expensive and impractical. Below are the pros and cons of each platform we looked at.
Shopify
- Already installed up and running.
- Excellent financial reporting tools.
- Heavily funded company with the resources to provide leading edge functionality.
UltraCart
- The order process is easy to modify no matter where in the order taking sequence.
- Price - On average Shopify is 500% more expensive than UltraCart
- No long-term contract required for access to advanced tools
We looked at several other platforms but concluded that the UltraCart Storefront would be the best solution for Pike Place Fish Market based on the following:
- UltraCart is investing heavily in their Storefront product.
- UltraCart is very competitively priced compared to other shopping carts.
- UltraCart has an impressive track record of being reliable and stable over the 12 years we have worked with them.
UltraCart Storefront was the clear winner. We immediately began the work of moving PPFM back to UltraCart StoreFront.
As we move forward, Capitol Media’s development partnership with UltraCart will ensure we can continue to build the features, functionality, tools and reports necessary to stay one step ahead of the competition for PPFM.
For the mongers, they look forward to using the Storefront platform which is stable, reliable, easy to use and significantly less expensive than Shopify.
Capitol Media
Robert Landis
Principal
www.capitolmedia.com
206-963-2580
robert@capitolmedia.com
Pike Place Fish Market
Testimonials
Just wanted to let you guys know that CenterForLit.com has been an UltraCart customer for nearly ten years. All it ever does is exactly what I want and more. I couldn't be happier.
Ultracart integrates nicely with our website, and handles all of the transactions. We've written a script that pings the UC API and gets us pertinent data for our CRM.
When we switched to UltraCart, we experienced a substantial increase in sales within two months which we attribute to the added capabilities that we obtained by using UltraCart.