The Challenges

There was the main challenge that Custom Plus Distributing was facing:

The old Magento website contains a lot of unqualified source code

Custom Plus Distributing has invested a great budget for website development with Magento, the leading open-source e-commerce platform. However, they made the mistake of choosing the customizing service which is not powerful enough to exploit the full potential of Magento. The bad thing is that this team worked with Magento (a powerful eCommerce platform built on Zend Framework) as a plain PHP developer.

In particular:

• The old Magento website contained a lot of unqualified source code

• Stock data is updated via batch file written in Python which is hard to debug

• Python script could not answer when data is changed

The handcraft data connection process between the Enspire ERP and Magento eCommerce website

Enspire ERP, the ERP program that CustomPlus was utilizing, is incredibly out-of-date. Finding technical support for such a system was challenging, especially when it came to investigating its information and features.

When confronted with Custom Integration - Batch Files, they are in this predicament.

• Used scheduled bash script for extracting data from MSSQL Enspire DB on Windows to CSV files

• Used scheduled bash script to upload from Windows Server to Linux Server via FTP connection.

• Used scheduled Python scripts to import data into Magento MySQL Database

• is unable to detect WHEN and HOW a bash script is running.

• Having no idea WHAT transpires when a data item is missing

• Afraid to make changes on the batch files because it may affect the other working parts.

These are all mistakes that an eCommerce engineer must not make!