No, we have developed our own fully integrated system for both our Southgate Street shop and our Online Shop. This avoids the problems that often arise with e-commerce packages which are disconnected from a shop and have to be separately maintained. This can often be very annoying to the customer when out-of-date stock levels are shown. With our system, if a toy is sold while you are looking at its web page, the change in stock level will be visible the next time you refresh or visit the page.

For those with a technical interest, our system uses as much Open Source software as possible and is based on Ubuntu Linux for both the Shop Systems and the Web Server. The Firebird database engine is used for the database. We have built our own data replication technology to allow real time data sharing between shop and website. The software is written in C++, PHP and Delphi, with the latter running under Linux and WINE.

Our choice of systems also has a green benefit compared with Windows. Rather than having to have a separate computer for each Point of Sale Terminal and back office screen, the use of Linux allows for a single computer to support multiple screens with consequential energy savings.