Experiences with Magento at mydeco.com – Interview with Alexander Ringsdorff

Recently we’ve posted a case study about the British design platform mydeco.com that explained the flexible application of the Magento open-source shop software. Today we complete the picture with an Interview with the project-manager of the design boutique project at my deco.com.

Find out more about the backround of the project in the following interview.

Alexander Ringsdorff is the CEO of the Visions New Media GmbH and in charge of the development of the mydeco design boutique.

How did the cooperation with mydeco start?
Mydeco had evaluated a number of e-commerce solutions including commercial ones like the one from Venda from England. None of the evaluated systems could be customized to meet the needs of mydeco in the according timeframe and the amount of necessary modifications would have limited the ability of the software to be updated. This was one the reasons that mydeco started considering to use Magento for their design boutique. We could confirm that Magento would meet the requirements without limiting the ability to update. Another criteria for the decision was that Magento is open source and there are no royalties on the software.

What was the scale of the project?
There was a team of three developers working on the mydeco project before the closed beta phase began in October. After a month of testing and training the new design boutique was integrated into mydecos’ system.

Was the project realised from Germany?
Yes. Needless to say that we were constantly in contact with the mydeco team in London. But mydeco has a lot employees working at locations around the globe so we could use their means of communication to work together on the Magento project. From previous projects we are used to work far from the customers location so the implementation from Hannover wasn’t a great challenge.

Were there any obstacles implementing Magento?
The greatest challenge was the order-splitting that is dividing the shopping basket into products of different traders and designers in the backend of Magento. Every order is divided into different sub-orders that can be administered by the designers and traders in their own Admin accounts. To realize this all the processes connected to payments, invoices and credit notes had to have a multi tenant function so the complete order could be displayed to the customer.

Could the entry of products by the different designers be automized so there is no further maintenance necessary?
The majority of the online-traders and designers listed on mydeco uses the administration of mydeco for the administration of their products. So there were only adjustments that had to be made to allow any easy entry and processing of the products. An extension of Magento is checking the main criteria before it approves the publication of products on mydeco.

How does the connection of the external systems of the individual designers work?
The connections are done with the Magento Core API. Due to the use of standards like SOAP and XML-RPC it can easily be operated from external systems.

Does the interface that is responsible for the communication come from Magento?
Yes, there were only a few adjustments like the multi tenant function that had to be integrated.

Tell us something about the about the technical side of the project.
The Magento elements of the design boutique were placed on an optimized high-availability cluster at COLT Telecom in Hamburg that is connected to all the European core markets by two fully redundant Gigabit uplinks. Colt has its own glass fibre network so that even international projects can be realized with this infrastructure. To maximise the availability all of the components of the cluster are redundant and the cluster system is regularly serviced and audited by independent security firms.

What are the future plans at mydeco?
We got a very positive feedback from mydeco about the Magento solution and are currently working on a roadmap for further functions and modules. It should be mentioned that mydeco has adapted the open source idea and you can expect to find the Magento extensions that we did for mydeco in the Magento community, soon.

Thank you for the interview.