Experience

Zane's Cycles

Zane's Cycles, located in nearby Branford, is the largest independent bicycle retailer in Connecticut, and the nation's largest "Premiums & Incentives" distributor of bikes. Wooster Group has worked with Zane's for nearly ten years.

A large portion of Zane's business derives from corporate promotional fulfillment. They assemble, test and deliver custom-fit bicycles to customers around the country. To expedite the gathering of recipients' orders and measurements, Zane's worked with Wooster Group to build an online fulfillment website, eZanes.com. The site was developed and deployed in under three months, and, since 2001, has procesed more than 30,000 bike claims.

To further help their customers, Zane's produced a brief video detailing the instructions for reassembly once the bikes arrive. Wooster Group encoded and edited this video into multiple clips, then published them online at the eZanes site.

More recently, Wooster Group has built an e-commerce website, BikeShop.com, that expands on their promotional fulfillment service to offer a wide range of bikes, clothing and accessories. Visitors gain access to additional products by entering codes from prepaid cards, received as part of a credit card rewards promotion or purchased as gift cards from retailers. To automate gift card activation and link to retailers, Wooster Group worked with a third-party card processing company, selected by Zane's. We set up a secured, site-to-site VPN and wrote (in C# on the .NET framework) a custom, low level network listener that receives, parses and processes ISO 8583 transaction commands, which then update the BikeShop.com database.

Additionally, Wooster Group hosts and manages e-mail for Zane's employees. We use an anti-spam gateway that filters 97%+ of incoming messages, and we manage all user accounts and groups. We've also worked with a subset of Zane's employees who use BlackBerry devices to access their messages and contacts, installing and configuring the necessary software.