Company Profile Great Lakes Wholesale & Marketing L.L.C.

, headquartered in Grand Rapids, Michigan, is a wholesale distributor of grocery, healthcare, dry goods and beauty care products to dollar stores, drug stores, grocery stores, retail outlets and other wholesalers. They offer a consistent line of quality continuity products at reasonable prices while supplementing the product mix with many exciting, limited availability closeout items. They ship the products not only to the United States and Canada, but around the world as well. Project Objective The clients requirement was to have an AJAX based shopping cart for their website www.glwholesale.com,which would work consistently across all browsers, thereby enhancing it to have a strong sales driven approach and making the shopping experience extremely simple for the users. Rather than going back and forth to see the details for different items, users can search items details and add them to their shopping cart all on in one page. The prime objective was to offer website users a convenient, fast and safe shopping cart so they spend more time shopping; or in others they can shop for more products in a much shorter time interval. Solution Provided GrayCell Technologies Exports turned things around by providing Great Lakes Wholesale with a customized AJAX based shopping cart where information is presented to the customer without the click n wait system that is normally a part of every web system. When a shopper clicks add to cart from within that window, the site does not shuttle the shopper to a checkout page, as many electronic retailers do, instead another small text box appears where the customer can edit or add any quantity of the item selected, without the page reloading. The shopping cart totals and quantities also are automatically updated without any page refreshes, everything happens in realtime. Further customizations listed below were also implemented to further enhance this system: Created a customized HTTP handler for product images' retrieval An Excel upload module was created to enable bulk data uploads via Excel templates AJAXIFICATION of different modules throughout the site Integration module to enable data transfer from handheld barcode scanners to the database

The project was developed using the .NET technology framework specifically ASP.NET 2.0, C#, VB .NET, MySql 5.0, MS AJAX, Custom AJAX and Javascript. The direct goals of the website included: A rich, fast and safe interface for end users. Convenient and fast shopping experience. Easy inline editing of items. The operations like displaying shop details, adding items to the shopping cart and editing the shopping cart are done without refreshing the page. Up and down arrows to increase n decrease the item quantity resulting in a faster, smoother experience.

Result The customized AJAX online cart has transformed the Great Lakes Wholesale website into a better

working, fast and more professional ecommerce store. The customers are able to shop with fewer clicks and in a visually appealing environment. Absence of slow and annoying page refreshes is a real boon to consumers using the application on a daily basis. GrayCell Technologies Exports has provided the client with a customized tailor made solution which allows them to scale up and spread their customer base.