How I moved from IT to e-coffee
David Erenboim
Sunday, 25 December 2011 07:52
Your IT –
Home IT
I want to share a story about how my IT business played a hand in transforming me from a hard nosed IT reseller and systems integrator to a coffee tragic that has launched a brand new online business.
<![CDATA[
]]>Microsoft Office 365 
My nana loves international roast and up until 5 years ago I was happy to share a cup with her or if I really wanted to splash out a cup of Nescafe blend 43.
That all changed when I moved my office from the Bayside Melbourne suburb of Elsternwick to South Melbourne. I sub-let a part of my office to a friend of mine who is a self-confessed coffee snob and refused to drink the Nescafe i generously provided. He explained to me that I needed to come with him for a coffee to a cafe that wasn’t too far from our office.
This was my first exposure to St Ali and specialty coffee. Running a successful IT business for over 10 years now I embraced the notion of replacing my boardroom with a more comfortable environment such as St Ali. I can honestly say that with the exception of holidays with my family, I have been to St Ali every single day since.
As you can imagine I started to develop a palate for coffee and my wife decided to replace our Nescafe with a Nespresso machine. While this filled the void for a while I am finding myself heading over to my friends place more and more often as he makes a coffee that rivals most specialty coffee shops and does so on a relatively entry level machine the Sunbeam Cafe Series.
I was sitting at St Ali one day listening to my friend complain about running out of coffee on the weekend and i started thinking about how to solve the problem. I didn’t see why there wasn’t a website that could make it easier for coffee addicts to order their beans and even get some buying power to get that at a cheaper price.
This led me to the idea of Coffee Bean of the Day. There are a number of sites out there that offer various deals at coupons but nothing focused on coffee. After some research we decided to pursue an open source model and built the site on the Magento e-commerce platform.
Prior to choosing Magento we looked at the other packages including OSCommerce and ZenCart. We felt that the flexible architecture, a vibrant and growing support community and many 3rd party produced plug-ins made Magento the most suitable choice for our needs. One of the great strengths of Magento is that it is built on proven enterprise technology such as MySQL and PHP 5 meaning you can expect a robust and well supported platform.
From a design perspective the templating structure of Magento gives us a lot of creative freedom but still leaves us with a strong feeling of control over the layout .
Magento contains a large number of the features that we required straight out of the box and anything that wasn’t was fairly simple to customise and integrate. We looked for features that would give our customers a quick and easy experience when using the group buying model. The One Page checkout feature of means that they are able to complete a transaction from purchase page to finalisation in just two pages.
I am hopeful that CBOTD will become the chosen place for coffee addicts, enthusiasts and anyone (including businesses) that need a regular supply of fresh coffee. I may not be able to enjoy a cup of international roast with my nana anymore but I certainly can bring her a great latte from the cafe nearby.
Loading comments …
Please enable JavaScript if you wish to view comments.
