Magento Migration and Development

Customer

The Customer is engaged in an online sale of printed and electronic books. The company develops two business lines, so it runs two separate ecommerce websites: the first one targets the widest audience of readers and is publicly available, while the second one sells academic books required by colleges and universities and is intended for students only. The access to the academic e-store is available upon selection of the educational institution and registration.

Challenge

The Customer had both ecommerce websites built on Magento 1. As the end of the platform support was approaching, they were looking for a Magento-competent development team to migrate them to Magento 2. Hosting their ecommerce presence on AWS, the company also questioned whether its cost and scalability was optimal for them and considered hosting migration.

The Customer saw migration as an opportunity to introduce some website optimization. As they were looking to increase sales in the publicly available e-store, they decided to refresh its digital user experience and visual design. Also, they wanted to integrate their academic e-store with the Amazon marketplace and offer students a backup plan to buy there in case a required book was out-of-stock in their store. To facilitate the management of the e-stores, the Customer wanted to unite them into a single website.

Solution

Code and theme migration to Magento 2

Chosen as a Magento migration vendor, We started the project with the code audit and revealed 12 custom-built interdependent modules of poor code quality. The audit allowed for accurate assessment of the work and time scope needed for trouble-free migration. Due to the difference in the software architecture style and code implementation between Magento 1 and 2, lift-and-shift migration of custom modules could end up with functionality breaks and serious performance issues (e.g., up to 50-second page load). To avoid such risks, our team performed code refactoring and then re-coded all custom modules to be compliant with Magento 2.

Tasked to add a contemporary look to the web stores, We opted for a ready-made Magento 2 theme and customized it to reflect the Customer’s brand.

Hosting migration to MageMojo

The Customer hosted their Magento websites on AWS and employed Amazon SQS (Simple Queue Service) and SNS (Simple Notification Service) services. Amazon SQS was used to render books requested by professors and add them to the rosters of different courses and academic levels. Amazon SNS allowed for the simultaneous processing of professors’ requests. We analyzed the Customer’s hosting needs and offered to migrate the websites to MageMojo. Created specifically for Magento-powered websites, it made for a more budget-friendly choice. As a part of the infrastructure (Amazon SNS and SQS, email services) and resources (images) were required to leave on AWS, Our team custom-coded integration between Magento and AWS and enabled fast data exchange.

Magento integration with the Amazon marketplace

Our developers enabled students visiting the Customer’s academic e-store to buy e-books on Amazon without leaving the website. In this scenario, a user journey unfolded as follows: after logging in, students saw a full roster of the required literature. The books in-stock were available for adding to the shopping cart. The books out-of-stock were shown as available for purchase on Amazon. However, the web store didn’t redirect users to Amazon but generated one more shopping cart and processed the purchase and payment transaction within the website.

Multistore and multisite setup

Upon the migration, Our developers formed the websites into a Magento multistore for the Customer to conveniently manage both web stores from the same admin panel.

Given that the Customer worked with multiple publishers, our team enabled a multisite Magento instance. Each publisher had a separate store view where readers could find the full book collection and brand information. At the time of release, there were 100+ publishers’ websites created.

Results

Both e-stores have been migrated to Magento 2 and merged into a multistore successfully with all their custom functionality saved and the websites’ performance not disturbed. The Customer witnesses sales growth as digital user experience has been generally improved and students have gained an opportunity to see and buy books beyond the academic program.

The Customer plans to continue the collaboration with us to migrate their ecommerce presence to a PWA.

Technologies and Tools

Magento Open Source 2.3.3, PHP 7.3, Elasticsearch 6.5.4, MySQL 5.7, Nginx 1.9, Varnish 6.2, Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS