Serindia Publications
www.serindia.com

Serindia Publications specializes in the fields of Tibetan and Himalayan Studies, but also publishes books about Central Asia, Asian Art and Traditional Medicine. Serindia.com is an e-commerce site which showcases Serindia's 60 titles and allows customers to place orders and manage their accounts.

Customers can browse all the in-print titles in Serindia's catalog. Out-of-print titles can also be browsed, although they're not available for purchase. Lists of new, forthcoming and sale titles can each be viewed with just one click. Finally, customers can search the catalog by title, author, keyword or ISBN. When a customer selects a title from any of these lists, a citation page fully describing that title is displayed. The customer may then add the title to her shopping cart or to a Wish List for purchase at a later date.

A ubiquitous Flash-based shopping cart is a useful feature of the site allowing customers an opportunity to easily monitor and adjust items being considered for purchase. In addition to being visually appealing, using Flash enabled us to avoid jumping to another page each time a customer adds a title. The customer is offered two ways to purchase the contents of this shopping cart. One way is the standard checkout process, in which the customer is prompted for both shipping and billing information. This information is saved into an account for convenience on repeat orders. The other way is a unique Print/FAX method, in which customers print an order form with their selected titles and subtotal pre-filled.

We provided several advanced features to meet Serindia'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. Finally, customers have access to a special area online allowing them to manage their account. There, they can update their shipping and billing addresses, view their Wish List and register for the E-mail Subscription.