The last months have been pretty hectic in the Clever++ world. With two of the most important shopping events of the year, Black Friday and the Festive Season, bringing  a surge in orders for our clients, there was plenty to keep us high-spirited in the back to assure the smooth running of our clients’ online stores. At the same time, we were involved in some pretty interesting new projects too, so we thought about writing a short blog to show you what we have been up to in the last months.

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Cupio

Cupio is one of our long-time collaborators and with many 3rd party integrations, including an external ERP which centralizes all information from the physical stores, and a complex website divided into two large B2C and B2B sections, there is no doubt that the scale of the project requires our attention constantly.

But over the past few months, aside from the daily support, the Clever++ team has been working on THE task that keeps us fully involved every year – preparing Cupio’s online shop to handle increased traffic and hundreds of simultaneous sales sessions during Black Friday and the Christmas shopping season. 

Our answer to avoiding heavy traffic downtime during a high surge in website traffic was to implement a custom Magento extension which generates a static HTML landing page in the pub folder. The page contains an index.html, CSS, JavaScript, and images resources and can be generated by running a console command. Products are selected from a specific category (in our case /blackfriday) whose id is passed as a parameter to the console command which generates the page. There are no MySQL or PHP processes running in the background when someone accesses this static landing page, and regardless of the heavy traffic, it will be up and running at all times. 

Another console command which re-builds the index.html is executed by a specific cron-job. Running every minute, it makes sure it will display the correct stock status for every product.

The page behavior is headless, so when customers click on add-to-cart, a custom controller from our extension is accessed via AJAX and adds products to cart. The same thing happens when someone clicks on the minicart. There is an AJAX call that displays the cart items from the database.

The search happens on the page, it works via JavaScript and hides or shows product items when a customer types in the search box. The navigation menu is also on the page, and no MySQL call is executed.

This way, a huge amount of PHP and MySQL processing is avoided, especially inserts in the database that happen at the same time. We noticed that some tables in the database get locked when an insert query is running, so the other queries will have to wait in queues, causing a huge load. By not calling the database on page load actions, but only on human clicks, allows for a big performance optimization.

Trespass

The UK sportswear giant is our newest client for whom we have been providing continuous technical support over the last few months.

Apart from that, two other interesting tasks have been keeping our team engaged to the max. The first one involved working on an improved way to deploy new e-voucher reports in the Magento backend. As Trespass started to roll out e-vouchers, the business needed better visibility on when an e-voucher was used, so the Clever++ team improved the existing native Magento report and at the same time, created an additional advanced report grid for gift-card usage, with information about ordered, returned, and used gift-cards.

Following Klarna’s fast expansion, our team also worked on integrating the Klarna payment option, the Express Checkout button, and the Marketing toolbox into the online shop. Usually an easy and straightforward integration, the task proved challenging, as Trespass runs an older version of Magento2. With the task implemented, the Trespass team is now taking all the necessary steps to plan for an important Magento 2 upgrade to the latest versions.

Super Farm Land

Our long-time client in the B2B sector, Super Farm Land required various UX related improvements and solving various situations generated by their SEO consultant. At the same time, the scale of the online shop required our support and maintenance constantly. 

Tini Mini Toys

Tini Mini Toys has been growing steadily and with an all-time sales record during Black Friday and the Festive Season 2021, it required our regular daily support. 

OWLRO

The OWLRO project is our pride and joy. Not only because lately they tapped their toes into the world of eCommerce, but because the project was a donation from Clever++ for OWLRO, an NGO and psychological practice that deals with children and adolescents with socio-emotional, behavioural or developing difficulties.

During the last months, we tried to help them even further and integrated a small online shop into the website, where clients can purchase an activity book and other educational products.

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