Paragon Asia Co., Ltd.
www.paragonasia.com

Paragon Asia Co., Ltd. is a distributor and co-publisher in Thailand of books on Asian arts. We developed an e-commerce website to showcase Paragon Asia's catalog, which includes over 100 titles from several publishers.

To help customers find the titles they would like, we provided several ways to browse the catalog. Customers with specific interests may browse by geographic region, subject or publisher. The catalog can also be searched by title, author, keyword or ISBN. Lists of new and sale titles can each be viewed with just one click. When a customer selects a title from any of these lists, a citation page fully describing that title is displayed. If the title interests the customer, he can place it into his shopping cart for purchase. He can also add the title to his Wish List for purchase at a later date.

In Thailand, administrative and technical hurdles make it difficult to obtain the "secure certificate" needed to accept billing information online. Moreover, credit cards aren't as widespread in Asia as they are in North America. Despite these limitations, the checkout process sports the look and feel that customers across the Internet have learned to expect. A subtotal is calculated, and customers can enter their shipping information online. Paragon Asia then contacts the customer to make billing arrangements. Customers are also given the option of printing an order form listing their selected titles and shipping information. They can then finalize their order by completing the form and faxing it to Paragon Asia.

We provided several advanced features to meet Paragon Asia's unique needs. The website uses Unicode, allowing the Asian characters used in many book descriptions to be rendered. We planned ahead so that in the future, books will be able to have titles and descriptions in multiple languages. Any title can be put on sale, thus reducing its price by a given percentage or amount. Discounts can also be created via promotion codes, to be entered during the checkout process. Last but not least, Paragon Asia sells many titles printed by Serindia Publications, also a Thirdwave client. We designed the web-based Inventory Manager to import Serindia titles simply by making them active and specifying a price in Thai Baht. This improves accuracy and saves time for the client.