Chocolate-on-Demand Online Customization Tool

Project Background

Back in 2008, three Columbia University students decided to start a business. One of them was already an experienced chocolatier, so they came up with a concept involving the online production of customized chocolate bars. This meant, in practice, that they needed to provide a platform where users could combine different ingredients and create their very own chocolate bar.

Sibers was asked to help sort out the digital side of this fledgling “chocolate-on-demand” business.

Solution

The system’s core component is the Creation Station, where a user starts by selecting a chocolate base and shape, and then selects from a few hundred toppings. After the bar design is complete, the user moves to the shipping and payment screens. For our customer, these latter two pages were most in need of professional development expertise.

The Sibers team integrated PayPal payments into the pre-existing Joomla website. We also added additional shipping destinations, and implemented an automatic shipping fee adjustment based on the user’s location.

For optimal workflow, we connected the client’s Virtuemart shopping cart with the Shipworks system, so that data can be easily shared between the shopping cart and the shipping software.

Last but not least, our work on JS and CSS provided a significant boost in website speed.

Tech highlights

• PHP
• MySQL
• Joomla
• VirtueMart
• jQuery

Results

Thanks to our work with Virtuemart and Shipwork, the process of printing nutritional facts on a label can now be done in one click, as opposed to the previous system, which entailed lots of manual work.

PayPal has made the purchasing process safe and fast, while geolocalization of customers makes shipping fee calculation a fully automated process.

We plan to continue our collaboration with the client by developing a native iPhone application for on-demand chocolate bars.