One of the headaches parents, educators and students have to endure at the beginning of each scholastic year is how to get hold of the prescribed textbooks. Fortunately this has become a little easier locally thanks to click-and-mortar e-commerce website by Agenda Bookshop launched at the beginning of this scholastic year, accessible at www.agendatextbooks.com.
Parents and students can order their textbooks from Agenda Bookshop’s new website, get an alert via SMS when the books are available, and arrange for pick-up of the books, which come ready-wrapped, saving a further hassle.
The website, created by BRND WGN, lists over 1,800 books for all primary and secondary schools in the Maltese islands as well as a selected number of 6th Form schools. It is open all year-round except in May and June for updating the book list.
“The site’s content is based on textbooks, therefore the aim of the solution is to facilitate the research and purchase of these textbooks for parents, teachers and students,” explained to i-Tech a spokesman for the bookseller.
“We have tried to improve access to this content by providing a simple and concise set of steps and also by reducing dependency on the school itself to get information about the student’s book lists.
“This was done by designing an intuitive user interface and decreasing the number of actions required to actually find the required textbooks.”
Agenda Bookshop report a very successful take-up of the service, with a 30 per cent increase in book sales and a 20 per cent increase in new customers.
“A major contributor to its success is that the website is customer-friendly while the business continues to use legacy systems to process order and maintain book lists,” added the spokesman.
On the website the user first selects the school and then the grade. The user is then presented with a list of books for that particular scholastic year, while being notified about the books that are the same as the previous years.
There is an option of adding book covering to the ordered books, both singularly or in bulk. An SMS is sent to the client once the order is ready for pick-up. The client can then make the payment at the shop where the order is picked up.
The solution that supports the website is a custom framework by BRND WGN that includes a content management system and integration with legacy systems of Miller Distributors, the operators of Agenda Bookshop.
The system has built in some interesting security features. It only allows a maximum of three quotes a week per client to prevent the creation of extra quotes and spam.
This limit is reset once a quote is placed as an order. Passwords are passed through a one-way encryption so as not to allow any password to be read by anyone. Account activation is done through a code sent over SMS thus offering a one person/one account solution.
All communication between the user and the website is conducted securely once logged in.