Namaste Publishing

Namaste Publishing is a successful Canadian-based publishing house with a worldwide presence. The company wanted to re-invent and re-purpose their site to foster better community engagement through discussion forums and social media integration, and to increase online sales revenue.

This project involved several vendors including MAKe Marketing, Boxcar Marketing, Raincity Studios, Corvus Consulting and Lift Studios. The Jibe was invited to join this project based on our expertise with the Übercart e-commerce suite and Drupal custom web development.

the twist

Namaste’s old site was built using flat HTML content, and had grown without structure or coordination into a maze of disconnected pages and sub-domains. Its e-commerce functionality was hampered by this setup and was cumbersome to use. The Namaste team needed a site that would be easy to update on its own. They also needed it to stimulate an increase in online sales and provide social space for customers to learn from and share with each other.

the solution

We engineered all workflows pertaining to store management - from discounts to inventory management to integration with the fulfilment house. For example, we extended Übercart’s functionality through an API connection to the 3rd-party order fulfillment house to automatically send order and shipping confirmations. This system also allows Namaste to import the returned shipping and product reports so they can update their order status, sales and stock levels.

Another critical element of a successful e-commerce site is a standard product type and categorization system. Customers need to be able to find what they want quickly and easily, and sellers need to be able to refer them to similar products in order to increase sales. Using Drupal’s available modules we built a categorization system using the North American BISAC industry-standard classification codes.

the results

Online sales doubled within 3 months of going live. Since then, annual sales have sustained an average increase of 400% over sales from the previous site. The new site has also achieved its goal of enabling greater engagement and participation among authors and customers, as evidenced by the growth in membership, blog comments and participation in forums and discussions.

The site is also much easier for the Namaste team to update and modify on their own, giving them greater control and flexibility with their online presence. Through our ongoing engagement with Namaste Publishing we continue to add features, provide ongoing user support and apply security updates.