Alexey KorepovBecause lack of shops with cool unusual gifts in my city, in 2011 year our family (me with my wife) started the new project, named "Caramba" - the offline shops with e-commerce website, that selling unique and unusual gifts, which people can't buy in our city, and even in whole country!
We was researching wholesale stocks in other countries, especially in China, buys only cool and unusual gifts, and sell them in our offline shops.
Within next five years our project was actively developed and becomes the most popular gift shop network in our city with 8 offline shops, and e-commerce website, that accept many orders and deliver them to any city in Russia and neighboring countries.
My achievements in this project are:
- Developing a modern e-commerce website from scratch based on Drupal 7.x CMS (that was in an alpha stage at that time), that contain many unique features for suggesting suitable gifts. I have created a special domain for wholesale clients with special interface, and back-office system with many automation of orders and product workflow, internal knowledge base with different access grants, various reports and logistic optimization modules.
- Very deep Search Engine Optimization of website, including self-created modules for automated generation of unique content, based on products database, regional sub-domain system for promotion per separate country Results was the first places in our city by unique visits, especially before big holidays.
- Integration of website with POS system (IncoPOS), online synchronization of stock and prices, exporting statistics and commercial reports.
Suddenly, at 2018 year the financial crisis in Russia was dramatically decrease the sales in our shops, because people stops spend money to non-target gifts, and we decided to close our shops and finish the project, with selling brand "Caramba" to other company, that was have good financial reserves at that time.
