Magento 1 Development And Support For An American Floral Marketplace

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.