Digital commerce

About the Client

Our commercial client is is a renowned retail brand in the health, beauty & skin care industry. Their products are sought after and are known to command great reviews across social media platforms. After being acquired by a Fortune 500 company, the client has renewed its focus on enhancing its digital strategy to widen its reach and capabilities in the online space.

Business Challenge

The client was running its E-commerce platform on Magento Enterprise Edition 1.10. With time and heavy customizations, the platform started showing signs of performance degradation, which made capability enhancements a challenge. To stay ahead in the highly competitive digital commerce market, the client needed to upgrade its platform and redesign its online capabilities and back-end integrations.

Our Solution

Team Objectstream was tasked with digital commerce rewrite on the upgraded Magento Enterprise Edition 1.14. With tight limitations on time and budget, Objectstream managed the project end to end. We managed the collaboration among client’s business and technical teams, client’s third party integration vendors, and Objectstream’s technical team in the US and India.

We used the principles of Agile Kanban methodology and DevOps to provide a continuous integration and delivery of an application for early feedback. We implemented a close collaboration environment between the onshore and offshore teams for smooth handover and information exchange on tasks. This allowed us to integrate, test, and deploy new features each day of the development phase, so that the client could review and provide early feedback.

Through the use of open source application lifecycle management tools and automated processes, we strived to deliver a potentially shippable product at each milestone of the project.

Key Functions Performed:

• Platform upgrade and customization of Magento Enterprise Edition 1.14
• Business Analysis, Design, Development Support
• Project Management
• DevOps
• Key Digital Commerce capabilities provided:

New user experience with multidevice optimization (responsive design)

• Customizable mega menu
• Content management
• Redesigned product recommendation and personalization tool
• Guided navigation
• Google Tag Manager and Tealium web analytics integration
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) customizations
• External product feed exports
• Product ppsell and cross-sell enhancements on shopping cart
• Streamlined checkout process with Paypal and third-party payment gateway integrations
• Real-time order data integration with back-end Oracle E-Business Suite
• Custom shipping logic and promotions management

DevOps activities performed:

• Installation of Magento E-Commerce Magento EE 1.14 on Amazon Web Services Cloud
• Installation and maintenance of the AWS EC2 Instances, including configuration of PHP and MySQL database engine on RDS
• Managed and configured continuous integration deployment process using Atlassian Bamboo scripts on AWS EC2 instance
• Deployed the client website(s) on Magento 1.14 in client’s AWS environment in conjunction with utilizing Amazon’s CDN, CloudFront, while running on Nginx Webservers
• Maintained the EC2 and RDS with Elastic Load Balancer
• Utilized auto-Scaling and provisioning where applicable
• Implemented session caching using Memcache (or Redis)
• Configured and managed continuous integration deployment process
• Integrated server logs with NewRelic and Sumo Logic for performance and error monitoring

Technology & tools stack

• Magento Enterprise Edition 1.14
• PHP 5.x
• MySQL 5.x
• Node.js
• JQuery, Prototype.js
• Atlassian Bamboo - Continuous Integration
• Sonar Qube - Internal Quality Metrics
• NGINx web server
• Redis Cache
• Assembla for source code and ticket management
• Letsencrypt SSL certificate management

The Result

The redesigned and upgraded digital commerce platform was launched Time between order placement and submission to back-end systems was reduced to nil The platform is now capable of onboarding the client’s additional microsites and it facilitates consolidation of additional branded sites onto the same platform