We actually started working for the parent company, Statewise Mortgage Solutions many years ago.
Most of the work we did for Statwise up until recently had really only been related to Data Mangement, Hardware repairs, Installs and Upgrades. That, and our old favourites – printer and ISP/ networking issues.
Since then we have introduces them to the online Fax service and also set up their Office 365 Tennant. One of the biggest benfits of these 365 tennants is they now, have all of their inportant infomation backed up both locally and online. Being a mobile business and working with people all over the place, it was important that they had both the security and flexability to access their client information from anywhere at any time. This makes working life much more productive and seamlessly brands all of their communications.
Since we set them up, there has been no issues and of course they can utilise the all important 2 Factor Authentication that comes standard with Office 365 tennants, giving you both great security and peace of mind.
As a keen golfer, the owner recognised a short fall of choice and availability of fun, colourful fashion for ladies on the course, court or any where really!
Lolliwear was born. They have all of their own designs and manufacture their own stock and ship to their customers. Even though we did not build their Lolliwear site, they approached us when they needed to add a mobile point of sales system to their arsenal for roaming sales agents.
Originally they suggested that they wanted to go with Squareup as their POS terminal, so we had to look into it for them.
It turns out that they were running a Worpdress site (one of our preferred platforms) utilising Woocommerce the generic e-commerce software that naitivly comes with WordPress. Whilst Woocommmerce is freely avalaible, it comes with limitations that can easily be overcome by purchasing additional add-ons that extend it’s functionality. I’m not always a big fan of yearly subscriptions for these types of addons, but it does seem to be the way of things now. Mo money, mo money!
To link Squareup to their store woocmmerce store was able to be done with an addon, but due to the limitations of the addon, the categories for products turned into a nightmare as the plugin did not handle them well at all. This made the importing of the products correctly into the squareup impossible and was abandoned. This is no reflection on the Squareup platform, but is is on the developer who sells the plugin…it needs more work! We did however purchase one of their older stands for the company ipad for a bargain price, and it is really a nice bit of kit.
We then found a much better solution. Woocommerce does have a Point of Sale (POS) plugin that works really well. We tested it, added shipping label printing to the system that prints to a label printer and the job was done except for staff training.
Now whenever a Lolliwear salesperson is in a country area taking orders the simply utilise the ipad interface to take orders. These orders are processed into the online system instantly and can be viewed or dealt with by staff in head office as soon as they are taken.
We finance homes for people, before we used the IT Bloke, things were a bit of a mess as we simply didn’t know what to do about it! We can’t recommend Mark highly enough, he always seems to have the answers we need.
Lauryn Weatherall – Owner and Principal Broker