Experience

Gift Box Corporation

Wooster Group is extensively involved in the technology requirements of Gift Box Corporation, a wholesale supplier of packaging products and solutions, headquartered in New Jersey, that has been in business for nearly 80 years.

We have been responsible for the design, programming and hosting of Gift Box's public website, 800GiftBox.com, since 1996. It has grown substantially, into a full e-commerce solution with a catalog of more than 15,000 products. About 20,000 visitors access the site every month and it processes millions of dollars of orders each year. The site leverages third-party online services, communicating with PayPal for credit card authorization and processing, and with UPS for shipment and package tracking.

A secure, companion website for internal Gift Box use was built a number of years ago. It is primarily used by customer service and sales representatives to place orders on behalf of customers. The intranet site also produces reports and charts to analyze the reach of e-mail campaigns we send on Gift Box's behalf, and provides tools to manage accounts and review products for the public website.

Wooster Group has worked closely with Gift Box technicians to integrate these sites into their preexisting systems, notably an iSeries DB2 database of accounts, products and orders that was designed and is maintained in-house. Data between our companies is securely transferred over a site-to-site VPN tunnel, using Cisco firewalls that we manage.

Additionally, Wooster Group hosts and manages e-mail and calendaring for Gift Box's employees and remote sales representatives throughout the country. We use an anti-spam gateway that filters 97%+ of incoming messages, and we manage all user accounts and groups in an Active Directory forest. Our staff's knowledge of mobile technology is frequently called upon to assist in configuring devices like the Treo and iPhone for Gift Box employees and management.

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Wooster Group was willing to take the lead in several areas of our company's technology strategy. I realize this is what a good consultancy should offer, but it was unexpected.

– Daniel Alessandro, Vice President, Operations