About

The Client 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 Client 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 Client 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 Client wanted to unite them into a single website.

Solution

Chosen as a Magento migration vendor, VolgoTechnologies 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.

Staging

Data Ware House

Data Ware House

Desktop Application

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 Client 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.

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.