Way back in 2007, this company made white vinyl window stickers of your favorite sports hero. The sticker was in the outline of a jersey, like a hockey jersey, with a name and number. So, this:
The stickers are made with a vinyl cutting machine (I used Roland Stika SV-8s), and passing it a special plotter file describing what the sticker looks like. The trick is creating the plotter file cheaply. By hand, it would take a really long time to create a sticker for every player in the NHL, NBA, NFL, and MLB leagues. Also, each custom sticker would have to be created by hand. Unless you're a huge company making large quantities, this is expensive and prohibitively time consuming. This company had a grand total of 1 staffer (me)!
The solution, of course, is a software application! The program automates all these things:
- Scrape the data for all the players in the pro and college leagues from the web
- Export all the listings (with a picture) to an ebay-compatible data file for upload
- Sending the plotter file to the Stika cutting machines
- Printing shipping labels via USPS
- Tracking custom orders from the e-commerce site
- Preview a custom sticker on the e-commerce site via iframe
- Generate CSV lead file for sending marketing postcards
- Save all this stuff in a Microsft SQL Server database
This is the source code of the backoffice application that does all these things. It may be helpful for someone someday.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. So, without further ado...
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The main screen of the app, allowing you to import/export data and generate a picture or a plotter file of a sticker. |
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The ebay screen where you can generate some or all of the listings. |
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From here you can import team player listings or generate a CSV file for mailing out marketing postcards to highschools. |
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For the e-commerce site hosted on "Monster Commerce", this screen would import all the custom orders and save them in the database for printing and shipping. |
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A screenshot of a portion of the database in SQL Management Studio. |
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Here's all the sticker styles and a few different colors. |