Technologies
AddOn Networks CMS and Web Development
Overview
About AddOn Networks
AddOn Networks is the world’s largest independent manufacturer of optical transceivers and high-speed cabling. Their commitment to quality, reliability, and innovation sets industry standards. Since 1999, AddOn has invested in research and innovation, leading them to maintain full compliance with over 40,000 SKUs.
Saritasa has been our partner for over 10 years. Their technical depth, knowledge, and can-do attitude make them an impressive partner. They truly believe in partnership and support open communication about expectations and deliverables. We’re both running businesses and have dialogues about how those collide. Those qualities have helped us get through a lot together. They’ve been a good partner.
We use our website to generate interest and leads. We’ve been tremendously successful over the last 10 years, experiencing 20%–30% growth each year.
Jon EikelChief Strategy Officer at Add-On Computer Peripherals
Their Challenge
A vast catalog of products is a challenge for any business, but the complexity of AddOn’s industry adds an extra layer of difficulty. Their clients range from Fortune 500 enterprises to government entities to data centers and beyond. With so many products and client use cases, they needed a way for their customers to easily find the products they need.
Our Solution
When AddOn Network first reached out to us in 2012, they needed a solution to manage their massive inventory. We started with a product planning engagement, helping them scope and define their requirements and then implementing the solution. Over our 10-year relationship, we’ve built and maintained a robust content management system (CMS), product configurator, quoting tool, and customer-facing website.
Part of the challenge is the fact that their products aren’t sold online, so it isn’t true eCommerce development. Rather customers are able to configure their product needs, request a quote, and then handle the purchasing directly with AddOn. The magic is all in the backend, making the front end easy for their customers to navigate.
The results speak for themselves: for the past 10 years, AddOn Networks has experienced 20%-30% growth each year.
Our Approach
What Saritasa Did
Product Configurator
The configurator is incredibly sophisticated and operates behind the scenes. Customers can only buy parts and pieces that are compatible with each other, which requires thousands of complex configurations. The system prevents customers from configuring something that doesn’t make sense. It walks users through all the possible available options based on the rules of the individual products. When new products are added, every new possible configuration needs to be created as well. The result is an extremely complex backend with an intuitive front end for customers.
CMS Development
The database we developed for AddOn Networks is extremely complex, needing to manage over 40,000 unique SKUs and their relationships, while also having room to grow. Part of the complexity is the massive importing and exporting functionality, as AddOn maintains a separate inventory management tool from the website’s database.
Quoting Process
Customers can look up specific hardware and request a quote. There is no checkout process on the website itself, as pricing changes based on where the customer is located. Different regions and countries have different prices for each product. The result is a custom quoting tool that helps the AddOn staff generate quotes based on the products and the customer’s location.
Custom Development
Our team created the wireframe and UI/UX designs for the database structure, based on MySQL and SQL Queries. From there, we built their custom web platform in SQL and PHP. While AddOn Network provides much of the UI/UX, our team built and maintains the architecture, front end, and backend.
