Magedia

Our Customer

Our Customer is a well-known UK based development company running an outsourced IT initiative that specializes in developing and managing solutions with a continuous effective delivery approach.

Challenge description

The Client had several projects developed on Magento 1 platform, and it became necessary to migrate them to Magento 2 system, which could provide support and ensure compatibility with the iOS application in future.

Moreover, many backlogged user stories were created for Magento 1 system logs, existing in various locations (f.e.in EU and US). These user stories were applied to update Magento platform and its installed modules, as well as to add new functions to the already set and customized modules (i.e. for payment and shipping modules) and special support tickets.

The Customer itself didn’t have enough development resources, so it was decided to find a company specialized in Magento development, migration and support.

Problem resolution

Magedia specialists started the work with the analysis of architecture of the already existing eCommerce Client platform and drew up a list of requirements for Magento code support and customization.

As a result was created a migration plan, which included and described steps to move the already existing in Magento 1 system data, such as product categories and info, clients and orders information. Besides, the team developed a detailed plan to migrate modules from Magento 1 to Magento 2, in case if M2 had no platform-based modules or the current modules required additional modifications and customization.

As a part of the migration process, Magedia team did a detailed research of the already existing modules in Magento 1 system in order to estimate the scope of future development work (to understand the number and the features of the modules the team will need to develop for Magento 2). Specialists had to analyze commits history of the modules, check the code step-by-step and create technical specifications for modules, which they planned to develop in future.

The most challenging tasks during the migration process were:

1. Gift Card solutions migration and creation of custom RESTful requests for it: Magedia specialists updated API calls with HTTP batch support introduced in Magento 2.3. As the Customer had different Gift Card cases for different countries, the team had to take into account all of them to prevent the situations of double usage of one card at different stores.

2. Integration with Google Firebase to generate push notifications about the order status for clients. The Customer had an application on iOS platform, so professionals from Magedia made an integration with Firebase API in order to configure and manage the notifications about the order and shipping statuses.

3. UPS delivery system. The Customer faced difficulties when clients put incorrect addresses on the checkout page. Every time when the store client tried to send an order with incorrect address the UPS required to pay a fee for it. To eliminate this, Magedia team created a custom module that validates all addresses via UPS API and suggests the variants for clients.

What outcome the Customer received

Magedia specialists successfully covered all the Customer’s needs and requirements - the team migrated the Client’s projects from Magento 1 to Magento 2, integrated new modules for better communications with customers, such as Google Firebase or login in to stores via Instagram. The Client highly appreciated team’s skills and ability to critical thinking, creativity and problem-solving, that significantly contributed to the increase in the number of the Customer’s store clients.

Our Customer

Our Customer is a major American online floral marketplace that accommodates about 3,500 florists delivering their services to more than 5,000 cities across the country. It’s an "Etsy-type" flower delivery website, where customers directly contact local florists whose flower arrangements are presented on the market. The unique feature of this marketplace is that the florists upload real photos of their floral design, as the website doesn’t permit stock catalog images. Furthermore, the Customer’s marketplace allows clients to browse flower arrangements of their interest and read reviews from the represented florists in one place.

Challenge description

The Customer had many backlogged stories to be implemented, but limited development resources prevented him to fulfill them. In this regard, our Client decided to hire more developers with Magento technical background to complete the assignment. Magedia team had good experience and expertise in Magento custom modules development and customization – the list of successfully completed projects explicitly demonstrate that. In order to estimate the development capacities of our specialists, both parties agreed to start the cooperation with the most complicated tasks. Before starting the development work, Magedia team needed to study the project documentation, because the standard Magento platform was almost totally customized.

Problem resolution

Our team started its work with the analysis of the Customer’s platform architecture and requirements to the Magento code customization and support. As a next step was decided to start new sprints (as a part of Scrum process) and assign development tasks to Magedia professionals.

The most remarkable and challenging tasks assigned to the team were:

1. Support of favorite “liked” products.

Magedia specialists developed the following functionality for the Customer’s website:

• Clients can “like” the product in order to add it to the favourite list. Subsequently, the customer can open the list of favorite products in his personal profile.
• Furthermore, a client can see updates – current information about “liked” products, f.e. if the goods are available or not (in case they are out of stock), changes in prices of goods and so on.
• Moreover, the website allows the client to see the most popular products among all users, showing “bestsellers” with the largest number of purchases.

This statistic was also interesting and useful for florists, who planned some future promo-actions based on it.

2. Integration with Quickbooks system.

Florists were really concerned about combining their accounts in Bloomnation with Quickbooks – another very popular platform for accounting and aggregation of various financial reporting. For these purposes, Magedia team developed and implemented the integration system of Magento and Quickbooks.

After the integration, florists could see all transactions conducted via Magento system when logging in to their accounts in Quickbooks. Data synchronization was carried out on daily basis.

3. “Florist to Florist” feature.

This option allowed florists to exchange orders with each other in case one florist couldn’t complete the job due to the large number of requests he received.

For this aim, Magedia professionals created and developed a custom React JS based application, which was made for UI purposes only. This application worked with the Magento platform through a custom-developed API.

4. Website banner management system.

This option was created to optimize the management and usage of advertising banners on the website, depending on the advertising or info occasion type. It was a fundamentally new feature, which florists requested to create and develop. This option allowed the florists to change the banners automatically after changing the information occasion - with the help of a cron job utility, specially designed for these purposes.

Furthermore, Magedia specialists created the unique library of banners, where florists could find the banner they need depending on special occasions (f.e. New Year, Christmas, national holidays and so on).

5. Hypertickets support.

Hyperticket is a special feature that provides order templates that allow the seller in future to generate an invoice from this order template. The main advantage of this option is that the hyperticket templates can be variously customized with HTML / CSS editor and can contain florists’ logo, inserted pictures (as a background) etc.

The additional option was to automate the process of generating PDF files for new orders (to be attached to the letter) that needs to be sent to a client who placed the order on the website check out page.

What outcome the Customer received

Magedia team demonstrated the professionalism and dedication to the Customer’s needs when carrying out this challenging and important assignment. Thanks to the effective development strategy, created by our specialists, the Customer now has the opportunity to grow its sales figures and save the budget at the same time. The team’s creative approach allowed our Client to improve his business processes through a modern and convenient eCommerce website that meets the needs of the Customer and its clients and makes shopping less time-consuming and much more pleasant.

Our Customer

Our Customer is a well-known advisory company based in the UK that provides outsourcing and business improvement consulting services. The administrative outsourcing function of this Company offers its clients professional services to ensure effective business continuity and a reduction in non-core business expenses. Among the services successfully provided by the Client are administrative support and virtual assistant tasks, document and contract administration and management, data analysis and reporting as well as virtual project management office establishment and support.

All business improvement services are provided on a consultancy basis, aiming to assist companies with powerful solutions to improve their productivity and minimize inefficiencies, guarantee cost-savings and implement continuous improvement methodologies. The Company also aspires to align businesses and IT, as well as to assist various companies with practical solutions for gaining a competitive edge.

Our Client is widely popular in the UK, providing development services for many clients across the whole country. In order to complete various Magento development tasks that Company needed to execute at the moment, it was decided to cooperate and subcontract one more IT development company - Magedia.

Challenge description

The Customer had many user stories for the warehouse management system developed on Magento 1 platform by its development team. This platform was used by Company’s external clients located in the UK and offered the following services:

• Outsourced Logistics Solutions;
• Warehousing;
• Stock Management;
• Order Processing;
• Transportation.

All the projects were connected with Magento back-end development and included the following parts:

• Custom Magento admin grids to perform CRUD operations for data as order analytics, shipping and stock information;
• API Integration with external systems (such as payment, shipping, rewards);
• Custom analytic reports generation;
• Custom order processing support (including custom order status).

Problem resolution

It was decided to work on the stories one by one according to Kanban methodology. Magedia backend developers would accomplish a typical work using Magento ecommerce platform with its further customization and development of custom modules. Prior to start the development part, Magedia team participated in setting project tasks and their discussion with the Client, as well as preparing all the needed technical documentation, that thoroughly described all the required new features and customizations to be developed during the project implementation. Moreover, our specialists fully took the responsibility for carrying out all quality assurance processes for projects and tasks they worked on.

What outcome the Customer received

The well-coordinated work of Magedia team significantly contributed to establishing of the Customer’s business processes and improving the quality of their work in general. Services provided by the Company became even more effective, what certainly ensured substantial growth of new clients and demonstrated the expertise of Magedia Magento developers.

Our Customer

Our Customer is a widely known medical company that specializes in publishing articles for people who suffer from acne and anyone interested in this topic. Moreover, this online store offers and sells treatment products that prevent and fight acne. Our Client is the largest resource about acne on the market established in 1996, what makes it the most credible and popular service on this subject. This unique website offers its readers various sections - from learning the causes of acne or its treatment, to attending the forum and products discussion, where clients can share their views about goods and get advice on such an important issue as acne therapy.

Challenge description

Among the main problems the Customer faced were orders synchronization issues between Magento (where his online store was developed) and external services, such as Amazon and Ebay, where the Customer was selling its products as well. Moreover, our Client had difficulties with displaying the shipping status of orders (whether it is shipped or not), which were synchronized with another system - Fulfillco.

Among other various minor issues the Customer faced were, for example, security problems and constant attempts to hack the Magento application, as well as the inability to monitor and log the application’s significant events, such as evaluation of the application work and stability, module errors, products delivery info - in case of using an external delivery system, and so on.

Beyond that, it was suggested that the Customer start using TDD practice in order to control potential issues with ordering process after the development of new website functionality.

Problem resolution

Magedia specialists offered the Customer to replace the most critical working methods of the module they used at that time - M2E Pro (which provides interaction between Magento and such ecommerce platforms as Amazon and Ebay) with the native RESTful API calls of these services. It allowed the Customer to monitor and supervise their work more efficiently, add necessary logging mechanism to eliminate potential problems and introduce some batch support for HTTP calls.

To better control shipping statuses of orders, Magedia professionals decided to organize a special queue where the Customer can place unsuccessful attempts to update the orders and indicate the required order shipping status. Additionally, the team developed the unique rerun mechanism which allows to check the orders from this queue and try to complete the attempt to update their status.

With the purpose of preventing safety issues with the Customer’s website and online store, Magedia security specialists offered to conduct a special security audit for this applications and check whether there were any potential vulnerabilities in them.

As a result of the work done, Magedia team identified missed security patches for iOS and Magento platform, together with certain incorrectly configured permissions for services and folders. Despite the difficulties the specialists faced, all detected problems were successfully resolved, what allowed the Customer to observe the decrease in the number of security incidents with the website.

As a result of the TDD practice, which was involved in the project by the Customer, Magedia experts implemented a set of automatization scripts to be launched on a special platform (Browserstack), which emulates the calls from real devices using PHPUnit instructions from PHP classes. Generally, the developed tests covered more than 70% of the Magento frontend existing functions.

What outcome the Customer received

The assigned tasks were designed and implemented according to all Customer’s business needs and interests. As a result of Magedia team work, the Customer received a stabilized flow for synchronization of orders between Magento (as a primary storage) and external platforms like Amazon and Ebay.

Moreover, the Client was absolutely satisfied with the received results of the performed security audit with actions suggested as steps to resolve the identified issues, and also adopted TDD methods and a security package, which can be easily extended in case there is a need to add more scenarios for automatization.

All the measures and results achieved by the specialists found a positive response from the Customer, what once again proves the level of professionalism and efficiency of Magedia team.

Our Customer

The Customer is one of the largest home improvement stores in the Nordic countries. This top online hardware retailer proposes its clients the huge range of products for home and yard construction and renovation as well as interior decoration.

Challenge description

The Customer was thinking of dramatical transforming their eCommerce website to improve its performance and user experience. They looked for Magento consultants with deep knowhow and creative thinking to completely rework their online store and replace the existing outdated Java-based platform to Magento 2.

When approaching us for this project, the Customer team has already realized some limitations on their website such as:

• Complexity of changing and customizing the existing website platform;
• Difficulties to support store’s Java-based system;
• Not really attractive website design;
• Poor website performance and user experience;
• Slow page load speed;
• Not user-friendly admin panel.

For all of the above reasons, it was decided to migrate their custom-made eCommerce store to Magento 2 platform in order to enhance the website comprehensively.

Problem resolution

Magedia team started the project with a detailed research of the existing eCommerce store platform including all the system processes and integrations. Subsequently, a precise scope of work that contained Magento 2 platform implementation and modification was defined.

As a result, Magedia team came up with an optimal solution to implement a ready responsive Magento theme with a few platform-based modules and to develop several custom Magento extensions in order to meet all the Client’s requirements.

Moreover, it was essential to keep save website’s integrations with the searching, web analytics, payment, promotional and shipment services that the Customer got used to utilize with previous eCommerce platform.

Our specialists also proposed and implemented some fresh ideas to make Customer’s work with the site even more effective and easy:

• Taking into account the difficulties in migration from the previous eCommerce platform to Magento 2, an additional custom extension was developed. That module helped to import all the information about products, product categories, orders and customers data from the prior store platform to Magento 2.
• Since it was impossible to work with the simple customers’ passwords, it was decided to develop a custom module to extend the standard Magento algorithm of passwords comparing. This customization helped to efficiently compare the hashes imported into the system.

To make sure that the Customer was able to leverage the rich functionality he got, Magedia developed a post-migration document where described all the things needed to perform, analyze and monitor site data after the movement to Magento platform.

What outcome the Customer received

The Customer appreciated Magedia company ability to fulfill the requirements and a tailored approach to the task as well as cost cutting improvements that were implemented during the project. The online store with smooth navigation, great customer service and pretty concise and well-organized information became the reflection of the Company’s customer-oriented policy. This formed a firm foundation for customer loyalty and revenue increase.

The Client is an Austrian eCommerce store that sells natural food supplements for physical and mental wellbeing. The store receives 200-400 orders daily.

The tasks were:

• to migrate to Magento 2 Open Source for enhanced performance, security, and functionality
• to implement new responsive design (using Hyva theme)

The solution was implemented in the following way:

Magedia’s team prepared data for migration and transferred it to Magento 2. The necessary set of modules for transfer was defined and customized for smooth integration in the new Magento 2 ecosystem. The team had to customize the modules additionally in order to eliminate conflicts with the Hyva theme.

Following the test plan, the team performed a series of functional and non-functional checks to ensure that the system works as intended. In particular, functionality, usability, performance, and the database were tested.

After the migration and redesign was completed, Magedia’s team continued to work with the client providing them post-production support. 30% of the work involves the development of new functions per the client’s request, and 70% is to refine existing functions and ensure system stability.

Results the client received:

• Page speed increase — 46% on mobile, 31% on desktop
• New appealing design according to customer request
• Improved website responsiveness, ensuring smooth operation on different devices
• Module integration for blog posting,providing vast opportunities for content management and SEO-optimization
• Solid website security due to regular Magento 2 updates (no need to make security patches for the unsupported code)
• Simplified integration with the 3-rd party solutions (ERP, CRM systems, payment gateways, etc) enabled by Magento 2