Ferrit 2.0 is a completely new version of Telecom New Zealand’s online mall, ferrit.co.nz. The main change in the total redesign is the introduction of a single, mall-wide shopping cart. Consumers can browse through stores, search for items, compare prices, features and attributes, check on retailers’ guarantees and returns policies, select products, load them into their shopping cart, arrange shipping, and then, when they’ve done, pay for them all by entering their credit card details once.

After researching the things they want on Ferrit, shoppers can choose how they purchase the goods: at the retailer’s store; through the retailer’s website; or online at Ferrit.

Once the goods are ordered customers can track delivery status and, when their credit card bill arrives, it will be split out by retailer.

Today shoppers can place products from almost half of the 95 retailers currently operating on Ferrit into their shopping cart. And more retailers will be added and more will switch to the Ferrit shopping cart from today. Goods from all retailers, including those who do not yet have a shopping cart, are available through the retailers’ websites or in stores.

As well as a single shopping cart, Ferrit 2.0 features a number of other enhancements which the company says makes searching and comparing faster, easier and more flexible and improve the overall online shopping experience.

Tools like Wish Lists and Gift Grabber have been expanded, streamlined and made more responsive to shoppers’ preferences. The site lists 1.5 million products from more than 90 retailers in 2,500 product categories.

Ferrit 2.0 was built with ePages software, an ecommerce application for use on hosting platforms, which Ferrit adapted to meet their requirements. The software provides Ferrit with a platform for hosting an unlimited number of shops on a single software instance. Ferrit performs the technical administration, and retailers administer their shops using a back office accessed through a standard internet browser.