FixPrice network has more than 2800 retail stores in Russia and the CIS countries, it also has ambitious plans for further development. Therefore, launching eCommerce business is an expected and logical step.

When FixPrice turned to Intaro, the website of the former already had the catalogue which contained addresses of retail stores, photos and products description but without possibility for online ordering.

First of all, we were to select all the necessary data including all images and transfer it to the new site.

Catalog migration

Previous developers had realized too non-standard logic for photo storage: two archives with 15 000 images in different formats, new and old previews mixed, photos of one product with different names and so on.

New migration takes into account all inconsistencies and uploads actual information to the relevant sections of the site. As a result, we have not only realized data migration professionally but have facilitated the work of content managers of the Customer (they don`t have to fill in 2 000 product pages manually).

SAP integration

The next step was setting up the integration with SAP. All data on stock balances and prices of each city of the network was being added to it.

Initially developed mechanism for data import contained files with information on each product of all stores of the network - there were about 7 million entries in those files. Search against the database took too much time. The catalog could not be updated for one night and the information on the website was not always actual.

In order to get rid of this problem, we developed an intermediate mechanism which selected the data on the products by cities and put it into a separate table. This has increased updatе speed of the catalog significantly and now data import process takes no more than 3 hours.

External registration of customers with bonus cards

We have completely improved the personal user account to realize this task. Only customer identifier is stored on the FixPrice site, while all customer information, registration and authorization processes were moved to the partners` server CardNonStop.

Having decided to use the external registration of users, the Customer may not comply with the requirements for data storage and processing according to the Federal Law No. 152 but there is a certain risk here - dependence on the functioning of the external system.
If a service with the data is unavailable because of server shutdown or lack of internet connection, the work of the Customer's site will also be paralyzed.

Access to online trade by regions

At the moment FixPrice cannot process online orders in all cities of its presence. That is why we have developed a special mechanism allowing to order or prohibit ordering separately on the site of each city. Due to this, online sales can be launched across the network smoothly. Now the Customer can change the settings independently from the development department.

Project peculiarities

On this project we were to be wrapped up in the specifics of the customer's activities, gather information for the terms of reference, understand business requirements of the Customer in details and show a flexible approach.

Since FixPrice team had to change its contractor, deadlines for launching the site were very tight and we did not have time for lengthy talks and discussion of details. This was being done alongside with the development. All in all, signing the contract took two months and realization of the project took three months.