Webstore Review: OASE Makes a Splash With Pond Guide, Great Product Info

This post is part of a weekly series, reviewing new sites launched on Amazon Webstore.The folks at OASE have put together an online store that’s easy on the eyes—but even better is the staggering amount of information they provide their customers.

Company name: OASE Living Water
URL: http://store.oase-usa.com
Type of products: Premium pond and water garden products
Time to build and launch: 8 weeks
Solution providers: None; built all in-house

Pond Guide
Let’s jump right to the star of this site—clicking on the “Pond Guide” link in the site’s navigation takes you to an interactive tool for discovering what equipment you’ll need, based on the size and purpose of your pond.

The Pond Guide is built using HTML widgets in Amazon Webstore, but the clever part is that they’ve loaded a series of Product List widgets into the page, one each for all the different permutations of product needs. When you change the options on the left, a snippet of custom-written Javascript shows the right Product List on the right while hiding the others. Well played, OASE.

Other Highlights: Sidebar Info and Product Data Graphs
In space that might otherwise be empty, or dedicated to a side navigation panel, the OASE team has instead included some “Did You Know?” info in an HTML widget to guide customers to the right products. See that on their category pages.

If that wasn’t enough, they’ve then added data graphs in place of additional product images for products that need them. See this cool idea here on a product page.

In Their Own Words
Andrea Szabados, Managing Director of OASE North America, Inc., had this to say about choosing Amazon Webstore:

“When we decided to offer a platform for consumers to buy our products directly from us (we are the globally leading manufacturer of pond products), we started looking at a variety of solutions including building our own platform. In the end, Amazon Webstore was chosen for the following reasons:

1) Security: We used credit card processing systems in the past, but really felt like we wanted to insulate ourselves from data breaches etc. that would potentially expose customer payment data. The Amazon payment system functions as a firewall between us and the customer and allows us to focus our efforts on usability of the store, marketing and logistics rather than payment processing.

2) Reliability: We looked at options where we would have had to host a significant part of the web store infrastructure on our own or leased equipment. We felt that Amazon’s infrastructure would be far superior to anything we could build/host ourselves.

3) Ability to customize/maintain the site: the Amazon site building process is extremely powerful, due to the underlying structure. Once our dev team learned some of the principles, they were able to very quickly progress in building the site and incorporate spec changes during the dev process. The customizability also allowed us to have the Webstore match our brand identity and the Corporate Identity of our main site.”