TheCloseout

The Closeout Deals is a website dedicated to provide consumer goods at the best price possible.

Inception phase

The customer reached us with a need to maintain the current website based on Magento 2.3 Open Source. We also had to help their in-house IT team to complete a transition for all present features in the website, including web design to create a new Magento 2.4. Also, we were on charge of maintaining and handling any issues that appears on the Magento 1.9 version for the InvictaStores website previous to the migration to Magento PWA version based on 2.4 version of the platform.

QA Testing phase

After the work done to include some modules required to integrate the site with the external systems, we started doing a side by side comparison of the websites between the Magneto 2.4 version and the old version to spot the differences both on visual styles and features, as the update was intended as a copy-as-is. With the results of this round of testing we were able to isolate and report the required changes to match the website.

Polishing the site and preparation

After most of the defect found on the testing were fixed and completed, the business team was on charge of going in and review that all the features that they use on the day-to-day were present and were working as expected on the new website. Several round of User Acceptance Testing were conducted and our team was on charge of reviewing and proposing the solution's to match the features both the frontend and backend sections by modifying the current theme or generating new modules to handle the changes. Also we had the opportunity to integrate modules that are related to shipping management externally called WeSupply and contact the company to review issues found to be solved by the module. The company sent back the fixes required. Same happened with the official module for Affirm payments, which we sent an Merge Request of the changes required to handle rounding on the pricing on the Product Detail Page required to pass their financing validation.

Payment processor migration

As part of the new updates, the payment processor was changed from using Bolt payment system to an integration based on Braintree platform. As Bolt uses it’s own technology to display the last part of the checkout process removing the need to use the Magento default checkout system, was required to give styles, validate and configure all the aspects of the default checkout Magento pages to match the same features as bolt and match the site styles. This includes configuring the payment using Credit Card, PayPal & Affirm as payment methods and also include the fraud detection system using the Signifyd plugin.

Pre-release & Data cleaning

Before publish the final work, we had to migrate the data from old Magento website to the new one. We take this opportunity to clean up the database, removing unnecessary data. In this case there were repeated attributes on products and categories, this makes queries slower than expected. As the website only uses one store, we generate a script to migrate the data and remove all repeated information. We secured and validated the scope before going live to make sure that no information is lost in the process. Also, to make sure that the server was able to handle the current website usage and expand the amount customers expected after the change, we preformed a simple site overrun script using JMeter to measure the performance of the website with the basic workflows of checkout. Also were on charge or review and install the New Relic monitor to validate before and after go live the bottlenecks on the website.

Go-Live

On the designated Go-Live day the team leader was in charge of made the change of servers, update the database, update the data from one server to the new one, preform the data cleaning, reconfigure all the credentials and validate that the system acts as expected following the instructions that the team had created beforehand during the preparation. We made all the steps and the business team preformed a quick review of the whole site before deciding to moving it live.
After the Go-Live date, we were on watch with the team to review of anything that might need checking but besides some minor changes on the styles no major elements where required to be fixed.
Maintenance & Pagespeed

After the Go-Live event, we are working on adjust any issue that might appear on the site and also, work on improving the page speed of the site with any optimization possible to handle the site on the best way with an especial emphasis on the mobile version as it’s the customers main source of navigation.