American West Beef is a Colorado-based online retailer of aged beef, pork, lamb, poultry, and seafood products. We created the site to allow us to market our steaks and other fine meats to a national audience. The site handles all of our marketing, email sign ups, product catalog, payment processing and connects directly to our back end fulfillment system for order processing. In the meat business we have some tough (no pun intended) competition and Drupal allows us to compete effectively with the bigger guys at a fraction of the cost, so we can keep our prices reasonable for our customers.
Drupal was selected as our CMS because we had limited budget and time to spend building the web site and all the features we needed were available in Drupal core or add-on modules.
The goal of the project was to quickly stand up our first web site to allow us to market our steaks and fine meats to customers nationally. We wanted a site that could be maintained easily and not require a lot of IT resources. With Drupal, we were able to build a complete system, including product catalog, cart, checkout and integration into the back end fulfillment system. The project was started the last week of October, 2009 and took only 5 weeks to complete with most of that time spent on catalog and content creation. We opened the online store in early December and had a great Christmas selling season our first year.
Technical specifications
We used Ubercart as our e-commerce engine because the features it provided were exactly what we needed and it was easy to implement. We chose Aquia Prosper as our starter theme because of its elegant simplicity which allowed us to quickly customize it to our liking. Ubercart EDI allowed us to send orders via FTP into our fulfillment system with only a little configuration and ImageCache helped us manage the images of the products which are the major selling feature of our web site.
Wayne Aiello