Web Store with Catalog and Product Management

Categories : All, Case Study, Retail / E-commerce

Web Store with Catalog and Product Management

Client Requirement

Web Store with Catalog and Product Management – The client possesses an online store. They sell computer and electronic products all over the world. Client has subscription with two known companies for catalog management and inventory management. The site admin has options to update catalog information from company A and stock/price from Company B manually. All placed orders on the website would be posted to Company B’s site and they will perform shipment for placed order on behalf of the client. The client admin will update the order status from admin panel once shipment is completed by Company B.

The client would like to integrate a payment gateway. The system collects all the credit card information and other payment details which are then passed onto the payment gateway for payment process.

Client would like to implement the following list of functionalities:

Customer Testimonials
Featured Products
Image Zooming Options
Tell a Friend
Auto Search Suggestion
Shipping Price Setup per Product
CMS Pages Development
Inventory Management
Catalog Management
Import Products/Export Products
Product Price Calculation
Order Management
Order Tracking
Show SKU and Stock Availability for each Products

Project Challenges

The client has subscription of around 180k products and would like to import all the products from company A to our existing Magento database structure. Company A has its own category structure and client has a structure different from that of Company A. It would be difficult to map all the products with right category. Each product has around 2-3 average images and client wants to import all these images into the system with correct products.

Client also wanted to update the daily stocks and price of all the products. While updating stocks and price the system needs to take care that the updates don’t affect the site’s performance.

Scalability & site performance is a key consideration from the client. They would like to make the system scalable with large volumes of data and visitors. They required making changes at the database level, code level and server level for fast site performance.

Technologies Used

Operating System & Server Management	Red Hat Linux OS, Multi-Server Architecture with Staging & Production Environment through Version Controlling releases, Server Optimization, Security & SSLImplementation, Scheduler for Back-ups, Alert Monitoring System Integration, Server Performance Tuning at regular intervals, Software Firewall Configuration & Maintenance
Development Tools & Environments	PHP5+, Zend Studio, Magento, AJAX, Java Script , HTML5, CSS3, SVN etc.
Database	MYSQL Database Server, DB Clustering, DB Optimization, Master Slave Replication, Query Optimization, Scheduler for Backups

Manpower

Project Leader	1
Developers	1
Designers	1

Planning

The project comprises of the following phases:

Phase 1 – Import 180k products from Company A, implement the theme, setup basic required extensions and implement PayPal payment gateway.
Phase 2 – Implemented shipping price per product, new formula for setup price calculation and Testimonial extensions. All this has to be uploaded for the project’s beta launch.
This project is T & M based so further requirement would keep coming from the client’send.