Imperial Topaz is a rare topaz variety from Ouro Preto in Brazil — a niche where buyers look very closely indeed: colour, cut, provenance, carat. The online shop at imperialtopaz.biz had to live up to that audience: collectors, goldsmiths and jewellery workshops ordering loose, gallery-grade stones, often across borders. The 2012 brief was straightforward in scope, demanding in detail: a web shop that presents the stones seriously and ships with a full e-commerce backbone.
- Web shop built on osCommerce, the established open-source PHP e-commerce platform of the early-2000s era
- Gemstone-aware product model with carat, cut, colour and origin as proper attributes, not free-text descriptions
- Storefront, cart, checkout and order backend in one package, without a patchwork of plugins
- Design and technical build from a single team, tuned to a niche buyer audience that judges on photography
- International shipping addresses and multi-language support as defaults, because the Imperial Topaz market is genuinely worldwide
The project is a reminder of how broad the stack at rockit actually reaches — not only TYPO3, but also a PHP shop system that fit the brief at the time. The domain is offline today and the entry is historical, kept in the portfolio as proof that we pick tools to match the job, never the other way round.