Among the most common open-source CMS like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and TYPO3, Magento stands out as one of the most popular e-commerce platforms. With the release of Magento 2, small and large web e-commerce platforms enjoy the advantages of the given CMS including easy configuration, robust security, advanced scalability, and potential integration with other platforms. Thus, Agiliway used Magento 2 as the leading technology for building one of the following e-commerce solutions we want to share with you.
Background
One of the European e-commerce platforms contacted Agiliway to simplify and optimize their product management system. The business is a social marketplace where merchants can automate their working processes and control orders in a consistent and easy way to offer the best shopping experience. The given e-commerce platform provides different types of products from home goods to apparel as well as a variety of services from peer-to-peer payment to the advanced logistics system. The company has quickly evolved from a small start-up to a large social marketplace expanding throughout the world, which provides crowd-buying service and even integrates cryptocurrency payment solutions. It allows buyers from different social groups to purchase brand products at a reasonable price and pay less for things they need.
Requirements
The client required a more advanced e-commerce solution where merchants might easily organize various product categories, offers, orders, and customer reviews. Thus, a basic focus should be placed on creating a single e-commerce platform where all products are located and managed from one place, which is possible by merging the existing e-commerce platform with Magento 2 and adding more extensions. We preferred this platform over other CMS as it involves more advanced architecture, structured admin dashboard, higher speed and performance, lots of useful plugins, better SEO, and robust security. With implementing Magento 2, we could cover a need to automate the system of handling all products, its categories, offers, and stock information to avoid manual data input and thus, reduce human labor costs.
Challenges
We have already used Magento for building several projects before and may prove that the given CMS constantly improving with new versions takes a leading position in the e-commerce market. We consider Magento as a top-notch open source e-commerce platform for building and promoting e-stores as it provides easy content management system, which perfectly suits for customizing specific features based on in-built themes, generating sales, and integrating with other web stores to promote products. With Magento 2, one can add more functionality by adding extensions, which works interchangeably for both admins and customers. Thus, working with the existing e-commerce platform required clear understanding of its architecture and different tools. As a result, during the Magento 2 integration process, we faced such challenges:
- A need to extend shipping information. We had to add extensions to set proper shipping configurations including shipping location, estimated time, price and expected delivery
- Taxes synchronization. All data related to taxes should be synchronized on Magento 2
- Automated update of all stock information after each purchase to avoid manual configuration. All stock should be synchronized on the platform through API connectors
- Solve the issues with low server performance
Solutions
Our main task was to customize Magento 2 platform based on the existing e-commerce platform policies and specifications. We have already worked with different e-commerce platforms including Oxid, WooCommerce, Shopify, Opencart, ODOO ERP, etc. As most of e-commerce systems are based on PHP, our team used the same technology to optimize all processes related to editing, creating, adding, and posting products as well as sharing and updating stocks. As a result, all merchants could have access to a single product dashboard where even without any background in PHP frameworks, they could place orders on sales, generate offers, manage stock, and get a leaderboard of the most popular products in demand. Thus, we implemented such solutions, which allowed to:
- Provide every merchant with an opportunity to register own account where one may add and manage products, its categories and characteristics including name, brand, price, tax, and shipping in a more automated way rather than manually
- Give an ability for merchants to better manage all buyers’ orders, messages, and reviews to provide seamless service delivery and choose the best advertising approach
- Integrate offers and stock information updates into Magento 2 through API callback
- Make all product categories be the same on two platforms to avoid any inconsistencies
- Customize all features on Magento 2 based on the given e-commerce platform policies
- Optimize leaderboard of the products in demand based on customer’s rank and send any updates to the merchant through mail to select the best offer strategy
- Integrate additional extensions into the Magento 2 platform in a consistent way
- Implement secure GTIN marker for trade items so they are uniquely identified on the market
- Add CRUD plugin to allow merchants to create, edit, update, and delete any product data or offers
- Provide secure authentication login method and authorization for merchants through OAuth framework
- Allow secure communication by means of the single API token use
Value
Integration of Magento 2 with the existing e-commerce platform became a perfect business solution, which provided the ability to manage products and improve the delivery system from a single place. From now, merchants can edit, create, manage, and track products and offers in a more simplified way as the system is being automatically updated in case of any stock changes. Not only the client can enjoy more automated business solution, but also now one can reap the benefits of the commercial value of the project, such as adopting more integrated advertising approach while managing customer’s reviews and a leaderboard of the most popular merchandise.
While before they had to manually enter the product input, now they have access to the system, which synchronizes any changes made on their e-commerce platform. As a result, this decreases time and efforts on manual labor processes and allows focusing more on developing a proper business strategy. Thus, integrating e-commerce platform with Magento 2 provides the opportunity to automate product operations, raise sales, and attract more customers to the market.
Apart from Magento, Agiliway has solid expertise at working with different PHP frameworks and e-commerce platforms, including Oxid, WooCommerce, Odoo, Aimeos, and OpenCart. If you need any recommendations for your business, do not hesitate to contact one of our experts possessing a multi-year experience in e-commerce web development.
