Involve – Invital case study

It was project takeover, backend, frontend. We were given the task of taking over a functioning e-shop with hundreds of orders a day and breathing new life into it.

About the project

Invital is the largest aquarium store in the Czech Republic. It offers over 8,000 products and is visited and purchased by thousands of visitors every day. In recent years, it has also penetrated foreign markets – specifically, it is available in Poland, Slovakia and Hungary.

The website has a close connection to the Altus Vario information system, with which essential parts of the website such as products, stock availability, orders, etc. are synchronized. Therefore, all product data is always up to date.

How did we proceed?

The owner of the e-shop contacted us with a request for takeover and further development. Due to the complexity of the project, we chose the path of gradual rewriting of the code. It consists in the fact that we replace functional units with new ones step by step, without affecting the functionality in any way or having to limit the availability of the website. Automated testing also helps us in this, which alerts us to a possible error before it could get out and cause any problems.

At first it was necessary to optimize the loading speed of the website. This is a very complex project where hundreds of users are online at one moment and a large number of database requests are made, which is very demanding for hosting. We solved this problem by choosing a hosting that is able to adjust its performance (or size) and thus meet performance requirements, e.g. during a seasonal increase in traffic.

The change in hosting helped us to solve another problem, which was related to hacking and DDOS attacks. Because of them, the server was overloaded and unavailable, which is of course fatal for the operation of the e-shop. Thanks to the mechanisms that hosting has, we manage to prevent these problems.

As already mentioned, Invital operates in several markets. One of our challenges was to make sure it served the right content for the market, but at the same time used the same core system. So it is one e-shop that offers relevant content for different countries. This solution has a huge advantage in that if we make any modifications on the website, it is not necessary to do them in duplicate on several websites, but only in one place.

In order to bring customers the most accurate information about the products, we have created automated downloading of data about the offered goods. Due to the large number of suppliers, Invital downloads product data (e.g. availability, product specifications, etc.) directly from suppliers using an API. But not everyone has an API interface. For such cases, it was necessary for us to create robots that can automatically read and obtain information directly from suppliers' websites.

The future of the project

Invital has ambitions to constantly expand and expand – so it is necessary for it to be as reliable as possible and technologically at the top level. That's why, as part of adding new functionalities, our effort is to simultaneously revitalize older parts of the code and gradually rewrite the project to make it as sustainable as possible and ready for further development. By gradually rewriting the code, work on the project becomes simpler and more efficient, and development is therefore less expensive. The project is also more transparent, which makes it easier for new developers to find their way around it.

How does the customer directly evaluate our work?

With the entry of Involve, the project saw a complete delegation of all technical work related to the website. So we don't have to employ programmers at HPP and we can focus on our main business.

When I compare Involve with regular development companies, in which many things are done unsystematically and then the whole project is a mess, the main difference is that we now have an overview of everything, we can see how the work is progressing and the code is being developed with the future in mind. Compared to better-known development companies with some history, I see the difference in the fact that during our cooperation with Involve, we can find the middle ground so that the resulting code provides the best price/performance ratio. With the better-known and more expensive development companies, I often come across the fact that the code is functional, clear and the deadlines are met, but the contractor always only paves his way to the realization of the project or task, even if he does not understand our field and the result does not make sense.
Vít Hellebrand,
Owner – rostlinna-akvaria.cz

What did the project bring us?

Lorem ipsum
Ondřej Tölg,
Project manager

See Invital live

www.rostlinna-akvaria.cz

Do you like the way we handled the project?
Do you have any further questions?.

Contact us

Check our other projects

Invital.cz se zaobírá prodejem akvaristických potřeb a je největším dodavatelem svého druhu v ČR. Dobře se mu daří i na polském trhu. Měsíčně zde nakoupí tisíce uživatelů a my se staráme o to, aby vše probíhalo hladce.

Navštívit

ČD Travel je cestovní kancelář, která se stará o zájezdy jak pro zaměstnance Českých drah, tak pro širokou veřejnost. Nabízí stovky zájezdů v prověřených lokacích a každoročně odbaví tisíce spokojených klientů.

Navštívit

Pro Zásilkovnu jsme vytvořili modul pro výběr výdejního místa zboží, který používají tisíce e-shopů. Je založen na interaktivní mapě a intuitivním ovládání, díky kterým uživatel jednoduše najde lokalitu a vhodné místo pro vyzvednutí svojí zásilky.

Otevřít náhled

Show more references