The client, Kölle-Zoo, is a pet retailer since 1969, operating 22 retail stores and 2 online shops in Germany & Austria. They are unique in everything: A wide variety of exclusive brands, shop in shop systems for trending topics like raw feeding, huge stores including animal-friendly livestock units, guidance for customers through trained salespeople, digital adoption centers, really huge show tanks and a lot more! Heart and mind for animals.
The clients’s team was finding a lot of structural deficits in existing system, and needed a cloud migration experts and developers for customizing Shopware Shop.
The client approached us with a problem that needed to be solved: the migration of their store from Shopware 5 to Shopware 6. The scope of work included supporting the client's devops team in order to make the transition smoother. We helped the client to implement a Scrum process and used Asana as the main project management tool. The technology stack consisted of Shopware 5/ Shopware 6, backend PHP, frontend Vue.js (Storefront), AWS.
One of the challenges we faced was the fact that the shopware migration tool didn't work well and we had to find a workaround. Another challenge was that the CrefoPay plugin was not adapted to the headless shop version. Our task was to modify the entire checkout and payment module so that the frontend would first contact payment gateway servers, generate appropriate forms on the website based on the feedback, and finally create the order and send the relevant data to the plugin in the backend.
The business benefits of Shopware 6 include better platform for promoting online sales. The new SEO features simplify writing relevant content and allow for faster and easier search engine optimization which is essential for ecommerce success.
Additionally, the new Shopping Experience solution allows for more easily and quickly adapting each page of an online store to modern needs. This provides the ability to build strong relationships with clients.
The technology benefits of new solution include a Symfony-based kernel with a higher level of performance, an API-first approach, flexible and simple plugin development, and improved integration capabilities. Additionally, the administrative panel was built from the ground up using the Vue.js framework.
As for the DevOps, AWS Fargate manages containerized applications. It auto scales tasks based on application load and integrates with other AWS services including IAM, CloudWatch Logs, Elastic Load Balancing, CloudFormation templates, EBS Volumes, Batch, ECR, and CloudTrail logs.
The monitoring solution based on BlueMatador provides anomaly detection, out of the box monitoring, and full monitoring coverage of the AWS environment. The CI/CD Gitlab integration with Postman Tests provides tests for every request on shared collection and scenarios that are exportable into JSON file.