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.
Project Details
Platform: Magento Open Source 1.9
Technologies: AJAX, Bootstrap, PHP Unit
Tools: Jira, Github, Newrelic, Jenkins, Browserstack, Pingdom, Magemojo
Start date: June 2017