- A unique e-commerce broker platform, built from the ground up
- Artist galleries and profiles
- An online store for artists to sell original artwork
- Systems for buyers to request commissions and for artists to bid on them
- A private messaging system between artists and buyers
- A payment system for delivering artists with the income they've earned
All built and designed in collaboration with Graduartist, at the Avatar Spring.
Visit the siteGraduartist is a start-up helping great artists sell their artwork. This art may be original existing work or it may be something commissioned to the buyer's unique requirements. We built the website as a platform to help make this transaction happen... as easily as possible.
The platform
Graduartist needed a platform that would allow artists to sign up for an account, create portfolios and put their artwork up for sale. On top of this, buyers then needed to be able to commission the artists using the website to communicate their requirements, to handle payments and to follow through to fulfilment.
The needs were unique and complex, involving deposits, private messaging systems, commission fees, international shipping, reservations and mass payments. We had to turn that into something that was simple and attractive to use.
Involved from early on in the conception of the business, we advised on how financial transactions between artist and buyer could be implemented using the PayPal Pro Payment gateway and how other PayPal services could be used to aid with the completion of the system. We helped Graduartist understand how the system would tie into their business and what they would need to think of in terms of infrastructure and data security. Then we designed and built the platform to make it happen.
Designing for simplicity
This project was a treasure trove of difficult design problems and a range of solutions were crafted. An online store is usually a complicated system in and of itself, but this project had many extra complications.
One example occurs when an artist bids for a commission. When they do so, they need to think not only about their own income, but postage costs, the percentage Graduartist charge as their fee and how much of the payment will be taken as a deposit; all this while while checking if they have kept that total within the budget the buyer set. An interactive form that does all the maths for the artist, makes this far easier.
Working the open source way
A system like this has to be able to grow and be maintained in the future. Many solutions were considered, but this project needed the flexibility of a lot of custom code to meet the objectives of the business.
By building on top of Drupal, Graduartist have a system that provided lots of useful features and existing solutions to help build the initial platform. But the Drupal platform is maturing, innovating and providing new technology that will make maintaining this project far easier in the future and help keep the site at the cutting edge. In particular, while the off-the-shelf e-commerce solutions currently available did not suit our needs, existing Drupal commerce code was used a basis for our custom solution. More significantly work is well underway to build stronger and far more flexible e-commerce solutions that will be able to take some of the code burden away from the Graduartist project in the future. We know this, because we are part of the open source community building it.
Contributing back to open source has already paid off for this project. The password strength validator built into Drupal 6 was considered too unfriendly to be included in a project for our clients. We redesigned it at the Avatar Spring and contributed back the work to the Drupal project. This spurred a further improved by the Drupal community which we in turn incorporated back into the Graduartist site, showing the great strength of collaborating in an open source environment. The new and improved password strength checker will now be part of the forthcoming Drupal 7 release and available for you to use in your project.
