Refactoring a medical community store

Challenge

The client is a US professional medical association. Its members use the Magento store to buy study materials, branded goods and practice supplies; the site gets more than 60,000 visitors a month.

Over the years the store piled up customisations that bypassed Magento standards. Platform updates became risky, the fulfilment warehouse integration broke regularly and orders got stuck. Every change had to be checked by hand, so development all but stopped.

Solution

• Module refactoringWe rewrote the custom modules to Magento standards: plugins instead of core overrides, clean dependencies and a clear structure.
• Reliable fulfilmentWe rebuilt the fulfilment exchange with retries on failure, a dispatch log and alerts when an order does not reach the warehouse.
• Automated testsWe covered the key flows with PHPUnit tests: checkout, member pricing and handing orders to the warehouse.

How we worked

1. Code audit

   We found every place where the code bypassed standards and assessed the risk of each.

2. Step-by-step refactoring

   We rewrote modules one at a time without taking the store down, running the tests after every step.

3. Support

   After the refactoring we kept developing the store on a normal release cadence.

Outcome

The code follows Magento standards, platform updates are safe again, orders reliably reach the warehouse, and automated tests catch bugs before release instead of after.