Case Study

Energy Federation Incorporated

Challenge: EFI had an existing but antiquated ecommerce store that needed to be redeveloped to allow for future growth. More than just a single store, EFI needed a solution that could serve the needs for a variety of other labels and be integrated with their accounting and inventory systems.

Results: Sunnywood responded to the initial EFI request with a plan to build a multiple storefront system with a single ecommerce engine back end using an open source solution as the foundation. The project was multi-phased to allow for a quick development of the initial site and then a staged roll-out of additional features and transition of existing storefronts to the new model. EFI's existing accounting and inventory system is highly integrated with the storefront so that both online and phone orders are accurate and up-to-date. The site's revenue has increase almost 70% in two years.

This large project continues to be updated regularly by a development team of two programmers, a designer, a system adminstrator, and a project manager. EFI has complete visibility of the project status through a full-featured task tracking system. The development team uses modern version control systems and separate development, staging, and production sites to assure that all new work is fully tested before moving to the live site.

Technologies:

• PHP 4 / MySQL 4
• osCommerce (heavily customized)
• RedHat Enterprise Server 3 (system administration)
• Subversion (version control and deployment of development site)
• Zend Studio Server for site-based debugging
• Authorize.net integration
• Numerous import and export scripts for database interconnections