Introduction
We were approached by a California based web agency that needed a custom plugin building for one of their clients – a local smartphone vendor. Their client offers a buy-back service for used phones, and wanted to automate the process of generating a quote for new customers in order to compete with other businesses that already offered this.
The new plugin also needed to be compatible with their existing database of phone values, which was stored in CSV format.
The form guides the user through the process of entering data about a phone they want to sell. It then generates an automatic estimate for the user, collects their contact details and sends all of the information off to the website owners.
The form uses AJAX to dynamically load each question based on input from the last question, without the need to navigate to any other pages. This gives a quicker and more seamless experience for the user.
The plugin also includes an admin section accessible from the WordPress dashboard the allows the site owner to upload a CSV file containing all of the items to go into the form.
The form is fully responsive, adjusting to the best site to fit the screen.
Existing Media
The client already had a large amount of media and data that they wanted to use to create the plugin. They had images for each model of phone and tablet that they bought and sold. They also had a large spreadsheet containing each variation of each device (e.g. model, colour, memory, etc.) and the price it was worth. The plugin needed to include an easy way of importing this existing data and turning it into a user friendly experience that was easy for someone to sell their phone. It also need to be flexible, so that the client could easily change the data in future.
A section was created on the WordPress admin dashboard where the website owner could upload a copy of the CSV spreadsheet. The values from the CSV spreadsheet would then be inserted into the MySQL database for use by the Sell-A-Phone form.