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Union pays to support college?s ?new brand?

Jul 27 2003 17:21

Simon Scrapmetal

Imperial College Union is spending thousands of pounds to develop a new e-commerce website branded as ?Imperial College London?.

No-one is saying how much this cost...

Imperial College Union?s long debated e-commerce project for the Union Shop appears to have taken another turn towards complete farce. Live! has learnt that although the Union is spending over fifteen thousand pounds on a new website to sell ?regalia? such as Imperial College t-shirts and cufflinks the site will be branded as ?Imperial College London? with precious mention of Imperial College Union or the Union Shop.

The e-commerce project is no stranger to controversy, having been the subject of an ignominious spat over a year ago. The idea has been under discussion ever since and earlier this year it was decided to go ahead with the launch of on-line sales of College Regalia to alumni. In May the Union?s Retail Committee resolved to award a contract to UKPresence for an amount understood to be in excess of fifteen thousand pounds.

The contract for design of the site was awarded to an external contractor because of the significant time pressure the Union was under. Although normally the Union would probably have preferred to employ student labour to design the site at a much lower cost, Live! understands that Imperial College demanded that the site be running by the beginning of July, coinciding with the ?final? launch of the College?s re-branding.

Amazingly, nearly a month after the stipulated launch date there is still no sign of the site appearing. Apparently College?s ICT department are largely to blame for a series of delays after they objected to a variety of issues, including the selection of UKPresence in the first place.

While the Union had accepted that the price of support from the College for marketing the new site was that it would need to be branded as almost part of the Imperial College website, the Retail Committee had been assured that there would be a ?strong? Union co-branding on the site. A prototype seen recently by Live! included no such thing, though a tiny notice reading ?Copyright Imperial College Union? was barely visible at the bottom of the pages.

The entire e-commerce project appears to have been relentlessly pushed by the College?s Communications Department to the Union that has been much less enthusiastic for the idea. Several Union figures have admitted that the on-line shop was only supported in order to prevent the College from starting one themselves and undermining sales from the ICU shop on the walkway. While the issue must eventually come to some sort of closure with the launch of the new site, it remains an open question whether the Union will actually ever make a profit on its investment.

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Discussion about “Union pays to support college?s ?new brand?”

The comments below are unmoderated submissions by Live! readers. The Editor accepts no liability for their content, nor for any offence caused by them. Any complaints should be directed to the Editor.

1. sporty

Jul 27 2003 18:10

Why the hell was this outsourced? Any competant DoC student past second year should be qualified to throw together a sodding eCommerce website. It's not exactly rocket science; the only 'hard' bit involved is selecting a payment mechanism (PayPal, NoChex and FastPay really don't work as well as they should for real business stuff.

I'm shocked and appalled that the union has decided to spend ?15000 on this; that's ?50 per club if it were shared fairly across the union C&S. If the contract hasn't been fulfilled in the time required, then what was the point in spending such an unreasonable sum on using an external contractor?

On a related point, I believe it is in the best interests of the union to investigate a merchant gateway online, for clubs and societies use. It would be a relatively straightforward problem to solve; in essence, what I'd like to see is the ability for clubs and societies to define 'payment items' from the union server - you'd be able to enter the item price, a description, the club it was intended for, and the budget code under which it should be filed. Then clubs could allow members to pay for items online, using debit or credit cards.

This would perform a number of functions; firstly there would be a vastly improved audit trail for both the union and for the individual club. Secondly, there is no danger of funds collected from students being misappopriated or simply stolen. Thirdly, it would allow clubs to easily collect revenue from members, especially for clubs which rarely have all members attending events. Finally, it's just plain easier for students to pay with a debit card from any college terminal, than to have to bring along chequebooks.

Such a system would actually be of long term use to Union members, and could be implemented for a very low sum by your common or garden geek. The description I've given is quite vague, but from my experience with WorldPay the hardest part would be integrating the payment mechanism with the current papertrail which the union uses to track funds. The technical side is trivial. Worldpay charge less than ?200 per year for a merchant account, and charge 50p for a debit transaction, and I believe 2.9% for credit card transactions. These figures make it ideal for subscriptions, etc- most people I know would pay for the convenience of being able to pay with plastic, and on the flipside, most treasurers would probably take the 50p transaction charge hit due to how much easier it would make their lives! Thoughts?

2. Mustafa Arif

Jul 27 2003 19:21

I had no involvement in the e-commerce project which was overseen by this year's Officers.

As for online payments for clubs/societies... we are looking at getting a flashy new whizz-bang finance system (with much less paperwork). However, it's a big project and realistically won't be in place until the 2004/2005 academic year.

3. ...

Jul 28 2003 09:26

1) It has the College branding to match the regalia it's selling... duh!

2) It's got Imperial College Union plastered all over the text of the site (copyright notice and T&Cs).

3) College is going with e-payment for a lot of it's services (so you can pay for research contracts online or something) via Barclays Merchant Services... why no piggyback the clubs on that at no extra cost?

4. Oliver Pell

Jul 28 2003 11:14

The e-commerce project was outsourced because of (what we were told were) extreme time pressures. Basically there was just over a month from it being approved to the launch date and this was slap bang in the middle of the exam period.

That said, since it still hasn't gone live, these pressures have obviously either gone away or were never really there in the first place...

5. idris

Aug 03 2003 16:18

and when you outsource something, you can tell the contractors exactly what you want and hope to get it. if you don't you sue / demand things be put right. contrastingly, as anyone involved in union affairs will appreciate, when dealing with volounteers or mates hired on the cheap, a certain degree of latitude is required in personnel management, which isn't always conducive to attaining the oringally desired outcome.

6. Someone Else

Aug 03 2003 23:40

Yeah, look at the last few Union website projects, all done by mates of the sabbaticals of the time...

Where are you now AOLServer/ArsDigita? ... even the latest one, ezPublish seems to have gone on an extended holiday...

Contracting out gets you a clean professional website, just like you asked, contracting within gets you a fetid pile of excrement that thankfully gets washed away in the annual (post handover) cleanup.

7. Just an engineer

Aug 04 2003 12:51

My memory's failing, someone remind me who project managed that [thing|http://www.ez.no/...:-])

8. Sam

Aug 13 2003 15:16

wasn't me guv, it was someone_else ;o)

ezPublish is a nice system in theory, but unless you use it to maximum potential and get everyone in the organisation and buy into using it, it will fail. Ditto any CMS - the first person to do things another quick and dirty way invalidated the whole point of the system.

Closed This discussion is closed.