Perfection InfoWeb

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the owner of an online retailer who sell photographic prints via a 3rd party.

For what projects/services did your company hire Perfection Infoweb, and what were your goals?

I hired Perfection Infoweb to help build the API and checkout flow. I needed them to help pull information about products and display them to the end-user efficiently and effectively

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

I have worked with a few vendors before but after interviewing Perfection Infoweb i felt confident they would be able to perform.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

We met to work on implementing an API via Prodigi, the work scope increased to including product imports and checkout on the front end.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

I have been in contact with one developer from the beginning.

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

As we have not launched the site fully yet I'm unable to answer effectively, however the team we're able to fully build to the brief

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

We mainly used Slack as a comms tool. This was very effective due to working in different time zones. The team is also very quick to answer questions

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

I am impressed with their honesty and understanding of the project. They are good people

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

There are still a few things to work out due to the complex nature of the build, but The team are hard working on solutions

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the lead programmer at a gifting company called The Fruit Company.

What challenge were you trying to address with Perfection Infoweb?

We were running a Magento 1 enterprise website and we wanted to do a migration to Magento 2. Our partner at the time wasn’t doing a good job, so I started looking for a new company to help us. 

What was the scope of their involvement?

The first step they took was setting up. We have a lot of customizations on our website so it required a lot of extra PHP programming. After establishing a working live environment, Perfection Infoweb then moved into the cloud environment. Unfortunately, we had to stop working before the fourth quarter because, as a gifting company, that’s our busiest time. 

Perfection Infoweb actually put the Magento project on hold and started helping us to update some of our websites that hadn’t been updated in a long time. We’re currently finetuning the final product and getting ready to launch it. The team is making some big changes that weren’t part of the original job.

What is the team composition?

Naveen (Founder & CEO) is our main point of contact and he has about 3–4 developers working on different parts of the project.

How did you come to work with Perfection Infoweb?

After doing research on Upwork, I interviewed 20 different candidates. I decided to work with Perfection Infoweb because, during the interview process, they communicated very well. They were also the team that seemed to want to do the most work, and they had a diverse set of programmers who were quick to understand what I was looking for. Additionally, I noticed that they had a good history of working on projects that were quite similar to what we wanted to do.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent about $85,000 on the Magento migration, which is much less expensive than other vendors.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our engagement began in February 2019 and they completed the migration in January 2020. Although the website is ready to go live, they’re still making a few changes. 

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

We completed the migration within the one-year timeframe that we had set. Within the first two months, we already had the main database running and had a working website on their local servers. In addition, we didn’t have any hiccups because they knew what they were doing. Any issues that arose were from Magento constantly changing their cloud environment. 

How did Perfection Infoweb perform from a project management standpoint?

They perform really well. Naveen does a very good job of managing his developers and he’s the one I Skype and do frontend work with. We use Microsoft Teams to communicate and I’m able to get in contact with them 24 hours a day. Throughout the project, they’ve kept in the order of what we wanted to get done, which allowed us to do testings on our side. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

When we had issues with our production website, the team was able to fix them within a few minutes. Additionally, when our website was down, I Skyped Navine at 3 am his time, and he got back to me within a couple of minutes. Their biggest strength is communication.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They could do a better job of making sure that all the deadlines are met. I was hoping to be done earlier but, as is the case with most IT projects, we did experience a few delays. There was a lot to learn because the environment we were using was the cloud environment, which is more complicated than the standard Magento 2 migration. Some of their timelines have slacked a little, but that’s the only thing they’ve struggled with.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Keep in contact with them. At times, I failed to make sure they were making progress. Be sure to ask them what they’ve done each day because if you don’t stay in contact with them, the project may fall behind schedule.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

Our business, Big Pixel Studio, is in the web design development and custom application realm. We focus primarily on web works versus localized systems. I am the CEO and President, and the Chief Communications Officer when it comes to dealing with technical integrations and creative architecture development for websites and custom applications for the web.

What challenge were you trying to address with Perfection Infoweb?

We were doing custom e-commerce integrations for a customer of ours using the Magento enterprise solution for e-commerce. We needed a lot of assistance from the technical end—the back end—of the program. We also needed to develop a lot of customized extensions, or solutions, for Magento to extend on its functionality.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Primarily I was the project lead on this. I was doing the wire-frame designing of the application requirements and they were fulfilling that need.

What is the team dynamic?

I worked with one primary developer. There were a couple instances where we brought in a larger team. Because of the scope and time frame that we had (we didn't have an immediate rush), we didn't need to bring in any large team element to the project. The project had a long shelf life to it. So there was no need for us to you know bring in a lot of development support.

How did you come to work with Perfection InfoWeb?

I believe we found them on oDesk (now Upwork). They had technical expertise in PHP and Magento (as a platform), which are the two primary development tools that we use for the Magento framework. And they had some good work experience. Magento really wasn’t popular until several years ago. We brought them on in 2012 or 2013, and back then, there weren’t a lot of highly experienced Magento developers. Now there's much more in the pool, but at that point, I don't think we had a large selection.

How much have you invested with them?

it would be in the range of 40,000 plus.

What is the status of this engagement?

We still use them as our projects come out. Our business hasn't changed, but the focus of what we needed them for has changed. We work with them on a WordPress build here and there. But fundamentally we can manage that, because it's within our wheel house. When our internal resources become outstretched, that's when we would potentially work with them.

The project went from October 2014 to April 2016. It was definitely at least a year and a half.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

The quality was good. Overall, I was always happy. Every now and then, you have a hiccup of the language barrier, or some of the communication gaps, that we had. There were sometimes things that take longer than expected. There is always this play about the communication gap and the understanding, and I think that's fundamentally a lot of times what we what we ran into if we had a problem.

How did Perfection InfoWeb perform from a project management standpoint?

On time was fine, and I really didn’t have a problem with that. Especially if we needed them to jump through some hoops. If we got a note from a  client meeting to get something up, they were very quick to address that—to drop their current project work and then move on to something else that became critical. That was always advantageous for us because it made us look better as well.

What did you find most impressive about them?

No I can't I can't say that it was anything specifically outside of the project that would be relevant. The focus was the project work: that was the in-and-out of our day-to-day workflow.

Are there any areas they could improve?

One of the things I recall that we had an issue with internal project management. We were the primarily project lead on a lot of things, so we brought them into our project management solution, which kept everything in good, concise control.  However, I noticed there were times when they weren't inside our system. If they weren’t inside our system, there some times there was enough of a disconnect that we had to remind them that they had something else within a different scope, but it was still part of some of our [partnership] requirements. So that would probably be the area improvement, fine tuning as far as internal flow.

Please describe your organization.

I’m the owner of a company that does websites and marketing for real estate agents and brokers around the country.

What business challenge were you trying to address with Perfection Infoweb?

We needed an iOS and Android app coded so that our clients could chat with any potential leads that were on the website. It was a feature for a chat between the client and the real estate agent. We also wanted to put together an account counsel

area so they could update their billing, update their credit card, and get notified of their credit card expiring or anything like that. We also needed a WordPress plug-in created that would tie into the WordPress database that we create for our clients - the same database that the app uses.

Please describe the scope of their involvement in greater detail.

I worked with Naveen [Project Manager, Perfection Infoweb]. He did a great job being available and understood what our needs were. The app is a free download right now. It’s just a way for us to connect with our clients. We gave Perfection Infoweb basic sketches of what we were looking for and they agreed with our ideas or gave us suggestions on how to modify things. Our relationship is still ongoing because they are still adding the account counsel.

How did you come to work with Perfection Infoweb?

I found Naveen on Upwork.com. I was considering around five other companies. The knowledge that Naveen portrayed on our first phone call together made him stand out.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

Right now it’s a little over $5,000, but going to increase.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them April 2017 and have been working together since.

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

The app was finished just last week. We’re still giving it out to our clients and doing our own final testing phase. There were some bugs, but Perfection Infoweb already handled them. We’ve had to push out a 1.2 version. So far everybody loves the chat feature. It’s great to have an app for any company. It puts you over the edge. To be able to say that you have an app for your clients is a good thing.

How did Perfection Infoweb perform from a project management standpoint?

They are great. The hardest thing for us is that we’re in the U.S. and they’re on the other side of the world. When I’m going to bed, they’re waking up. That could be a United States thing as well, depending on where you’re located. Naveen made himself regularly available even if it was 1:00 AM his time. We communicated through Skype. I never dove straight into any code or anything. It was just project management and making sure it all worked correctly.

What distinguishes Perfection Infoweb from other providers?

The knowledge and the suggestions that they had, it’s evident they’ve gone through all this stuff before. They have experience in what to do and what not to do.

Is there anything Perfection Infoweb could have improved or done differently?

If they could get on the same timeline as us in the United States, that’d be great. I realize that’s impossible.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We are a specialty food retailer operating a website which sells our products throughout the U.S. We’re based in the New England area, Boston, New York and Cambridge, and Massachusetts, where our mail-order operation is located. Our scale is around $10 million per year, with the online business representing a small portion of that. We’re a small shop with 3 retail locations. Between those, we have fewer than 70 employees.

What challenge were you trying to address with Perfection Infoweb?

We have a Magento website for which we needed to make enhancements and have ongoing maintenance and bug fixing.

What was the scope of their involvement?

My experience with Perfection Infoweb has been around e-commerce work.

How did you come to work with Perfection Infoweb?

I found them on Upwork. Perfection Infoweb came up as having good qualities on all the points I wanted, from skillset to pay rate.

How much have you invested with Perfection Infoweb?

The cost of the average project has been between $2,000 and $10,000. The total amount that I've spent is over $60,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Perfection in March 2016. We have completed most of our list of goals and tasks, aside from a few nips and tucks.

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

We had a series of different functional improvements to make on the backend, which our team needed in order to make their daily work more efficient. Perfection Infoweb’s work directly impacted the amount of time we spent processing orders for the better. We have decreased the time spent per order, and have processed more of them each day. Generally, Perfection Infoweb has made other functional improvements, both on the frontend and the backend, making a better experience for customers and backend users.

I don’t have any concrete proof of a business increase resulting from their work. We’ve made a lot of other changes as well. It was important for us to get to a point of being comfortable promoting the site, and we have achieved this. Perfection Infoweb’s work had a direct impact on our willingness to market the site. The business increase was in large part due to the promotion, which, in turn, was a result of the changes we made to the site.

How did Perfection Infoweb perform from a project management standpoint?

I was not used to working with teams in India. It turned out that the best communication method with Perfection Infoweb was messaging via Skype. Very rarely would I need to get on the telephone with them, but I did do it. They ended up being available and good at keeping in touch.

Are there any areas Perfection Infoweb could improve?

They could take the time to better define the requirements and expectations upfront, and make 100% sure that they are clear on what the work is before it’s started. A part of this is Perfection Infoweb’s responsibility, but the customer also needs to define specs more clearly. As a vendor, it was in their best interest to push this more than they did with us.

Please describe your company and your position there.

Our company delivers top quality Magento 2 extensions and support for our clients. We integrate anything using web protocols including complex Single Sign-On integrations and create custom Symfony applications.

For what projects/services did your company hire Perfection InfoWeb, and what were your goals?

Our extensions have a lot of complexity. We hired Perfection InfoWeb to aid us in the ongoing maintenance of our extensions aswell as helping us to build great solutions for our Magento 2 clients.

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

We found them on Upwork in 2021 when we were searching for a partner to work with.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

Our work is a support structure, therefor its ongoing support for our Magento 2 clients and our own extensions involving PHP, MySQL, HTML, Javascript including KnockoutJS and RequireJS.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

several, working mainly with the owner but some employees sometimes do templating work.

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

Our internal development time is cut in half by contracting Perfection InfoWeb.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

We use our slack channel and JIRA. They are flexible and work with our systems

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

They truely know magento up to a level we need a developer to understand it.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

We could improve in communication, but i think thats a valid point for every business relationship.