Part Catalog - Magento 2 migration done right

Overview

Alan Marek is the owner of PartCatalog, providing the highest quality auto and truck accessories. We’ve worked with Alan since 2015 when he approached Magently with an unfinished Magento 1 shop.
He was trying to set up a store with automotive parts and his developers at that time weren’t able to handle
the project, so we took over. The developers sorted the shop out and since then we’ve been working on improving the
performance, building new functionalities, and fixing bugs. We’ve also developed a very good relationship with Alan.

At the end of 2018, Alan decided to migrate from Magento 1.7 to Magento 2. Therefore, in December 2018.
Magently started working on migrating the e-commerce features and data to Magento 2.3.

Magento 2 migration – Process

The migration process is quite complex, but it can be a smooth operation if everyone works together, communicates well and all hands are on board when necessary. Our process for managing the project, in this case, was the following:

Website on Magento 1

Our solution

The Team

The team working on our side was: Project Manager, Project Lead, 2-5 Developers depending on the needs during
the project and our availability and the Quality Managers.

A project of this size requires careful progress- and task-tracking, so we invited Alan to Redmine, a tool we use to manage our projects internally. Along with real-time Slack communication, we managed to make the process smooth and transparent.

Magento Version

We decided to choose Magento 2.3, which saved us time as it contained some functionalities we’d otherwise have
to write from scratch. On the other hand, some of the modules we needed to use were not compatible with 2.3 yet.

Alan was eager to help, so we asked him to contact all module providers that didn’t have the compatibility information stated on their websites. We started with around 15 extensions to install – but the list had to change during the process, as some modules were confirmed not to support Magento 2.3. Flexibility is a must if you have
a complex project and a limited budget (which is often the case ;-).

The project took a few months, therefore, we waited with installing some of the modules – otherwise their free support periods could have finished before we delivered the project. It mainly applied to modules that didn’t affect the theme and with which we didn’t have to worry that we will need to adjust the frontend again after installing them. In the meantime, the compatible versions with Magento 2.3 have been released. Still, we had to skip the non-critical ones and some of the others had to be adjusted by us.

In the end, though it presented some challenges, Magento 2.3 turned out to be a good choice and didn’t cause
too many problems during the development.

Magento 2 migration

Regular tests

We believe it’s better to be safe than sorry, therefore, we kept testing the website to make sure that we don’t find
out just before going live that there are loads of bugs and we have to significantly move the delivery date. When planning the project, we allowed 8 working days for bug fixing just before the final Magento 2 migration. Eventually, we didn’t need so much time at that point, because some tests had been run much earlier and we’d already addressed some of the issues. However, we did have a small delay at the end of the project, so I believe that it all balanced out quite well.

The Outcome

The project took around 5 months and 2 thousand hours to deliver, and we went live 2 weeks after the planned date. Since we didn’t have the detailed scope of the required work, we weren’t able to specify the deadline until the end of the third month. We were completely flexible, but we kept an eye on everything so as not to cause unnecessary delays. This is not a standard procedure, but our relationship with Alan was very good and both parties believed that this is the best way to proceed.

Both the client and Magently were happy with the outcome of the work. We had a small delay with delivering the project and a few bumps on the way occurred – but hey, how many Magento projects go exactly according to plan? 🙂 We believe that we managed to handle the problems smoothly and quickly, and Alan was also supportive and very helpful all the time.