Many of you asked me to provide a feedback on how we are doing with Magento 2 migration. In this series I am going to share our story. Since we have just started with Magento 1 to Magento 2 migration with right people in a place, I really believe and hope the journey is going to be interesting. By the end of the migration I want to say: “Yes, our history is a success!”.

Background

Let me give you, my friend, some background. 8 months ago I decided to try myself in a new role. I was working at Magento division for last 5 years building Magento products. I thought it might be a good idea to use Magento from another angle. From Merchant’s point of view (dark side). It is different. And interesting at the same time.

So I moved to work to a Merchant’s side who loves Magento. Magento 1. The platform which is deeply customized. Huge customizations. Even Core base. It is even hard to describe on how the platform was changed. I knew from my past experience how Magento can be customized, however this time I was really surprised. It is like you were building luxury cars for last 5 years and after all the luxury car looks like a bus.

But having a bus which can help customers to find what they are looking for isn’t so bad. Company achieves its revenue goals. Everyone is happy.

Company has 2 primary websites. First website’s mission is to deliver happiness by selling various local gifts from Ireland. Primary audience is from Ireland, United Kingdom and Europe. The website initially has been launched 10 years ago (no one remembers what system was at that time). In 2010 company decided to relaunch the website using Magento CE 1.4. And development work was outsourced. As I said, Magento Core code was deeply customized. On top of “cool” customization a bunch of features were implemented.

My favorite customization for the website is to have support to store multiple shipping addresses per order. Let’s stop here for a moment. One order – 10 shipping addresses. Hey, Magento Developers, can you imagine how is it even theoretically possible in Magento to create this? By the way, leave a comment with your thoughts.

Most important, this feature was implemented partially, meaning that only 60% of Sales related functionality has been adjusted. Due to multiple shipping address per order support almost 50% of out-of-box functionality was disabled. Do you think 3rd-party extensions works straight away? All Modules were customized. Why? To enable multiple shipping addresses per order.

That is why I started to worry about outsourcing. I think it isn’t just one Merchant who might get such nice features. There are millions of eCommerce websites and good amount of outsourced work.

This isn’t story about it anyway. It is about second website. The website has been launched for USA market in 2014 for people who want to feel close connection to Ireland. Due to some reasons the website is based on cusomized Magento CE 1.4 with multishipping adress per order support. Boom!

Decisions

Few years ago company decided to have in-house development department. Hopefully, the websites have been updated from Magento 1.4 to 1.7 and finally to 1.9. It does not automatically mean that all features introduced in new Magento versions became available. It means some security updates, patches etc.

Back to 2015. As CTO of the company, who is responsible for all software development, I started discussion about building website from scratch. Of course, there were demos, presentations, proofs of ideas, more presentations, more ideas and problem statements. After 4 months we came to a common understanding that website needs to be re-implemented. From zero. NEW.

As I came from Magento 2 world, building this product for 2 years I was sure, back in August 2015 that Magento 2 GA release will happen.

February 2016 – The Story begins…