Strange Cargo is a unique store in the heart of Chicago. They sell custom made t-shirts and many other goodies. As a unique store they wanted a unique online store so after a few attempts they came to CSW Solutions for a real solution. The whole website is out of the ordinary. We created a system that allows customers to actually build their own t-shirt and see a preview of it. Among other options, customers can select the type of shirt, color and size for a specific image to be printed.

Everything is controlled from the back-end site where Strange Cargo manages the shirts, colors, sizes, orders and even the keywords, URL's and SEO options.

There were basically two main challenges with the website. The first was the huge amount of integration with cloud services and the second was how to handle payment transactions in a fast and secure way.
Cloud services includes payment gateways (Paypal and Authorize.NET), shipping services (USPS, UPS, In-Store pickup), tax services, image management services (Scene7 and Flickr), blog services (Wordpress) and social services (Facebook, Twitter, Stumble Upon, Delicious, etc.) The Payment transaction system was developed using our own components for integration with Authorize.NET, which handles more than 90% of transactions from major credit card firms.

The website was built using a lot of custom made code classes. All of the classes integrate with native API's from providers such as shipping carriers and payment gateways. We use SQL Server 2005 for the database solution and ASP.NET 3.5 to handle all the pages development. Among others we used Telerik RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX, SQL Server Reporting Services and Subsonic for the database interaction.

Strange Cargo's success in the online arena is a proof that a well designed, developed and delivered solution can be of tremendous value for it's owner. The system has been live for over a year now and serves several hundreds of customer every day.

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