The business challenge
The beneficiary of our product is a premium pet food provider, with an online multi-store, Magento based, active in 7 different countries from Europe.
The client was experiencing major problems in maintaining a complex, unstable eCommerce platform based on an old Magento version. He required an upgrade on his system, but since we have started the collaboration in 2015 we have managed to improve the business in many other areas.
Our solution
We are experts in developing and customizing web portals based on Magento’s eCommerce solution. Magento is the most used eCommerce application worldwide and it is an open source product that successfully competes with the alternative commercial solutions.
For our client we have:
- Successfully upgraded to the latest Magento version 1.9.2.2 from 1.6.0, upgraded payment modules, migrated to a new checkout, cleaned up old and incompatible modules
- Developed a subscription module with automated ordering & payment which allows the customers to manage their own subscriptions from their account, change next order date/products or unsubscribe whenever they want and also process orders automatically daily. The same actions can be made from the admin panel.
- Built a module that allows the admin to add new custom landing pages with multiple configurable products and specific coupon codes. Also multiple reports are being sent automatically (daily) with sales reports and other data
- Developed a custom landing page with a forecast calculator that allows our customers to find out how much product to order, which is also being sent automatically in pdf format to the email our customer has provided
- Improved cache performance, configured a new live environment with PHP7, Nginx, Redis, Varnish
- Cut down server costs by 50%
Team setup
We embrace Agile methodologies in most of our projects. Many times it is our customers and partners who ask us to use Agile methodologies (Scrum, Kanban) from the inception of the project. When the choice is left to our engineers, we carefully analyze the project specifics, and we propose a project management methodology based on Scrum or Kanban which best fits the specific project needs and context.
We had a core project team of two developers and one designer for this project. Depending on the project stage and necessities more people were relocated to this project. They were working in close collaboration with our customer team.
As in all of our projects, we worked in an agile and flexible way. We had daily scrum meetings with sprints and demo release every two weeks.
Architecture & Technologies
Architecture
The project applies the conventions of object-oriented programming and model view controller architecture, but also uses the entity attribute value model to store data.
Technologies
- Magento, PHP, MySQL
- Amazon Web Services (AWS – EC2, S3, CloudFront, RDS, Elastic Cache, VPC, Route 53)
- Varnish Cache, Redis, Vagrant, Beanstalk for version control and deploy, Puppet, Nginx, Trello (Kanban)