.NET Core – ISDK – Omnichannel and eCommerce retail solutions, CRM-marketing

Customer

Theater and stage equipment supplier

STEFCO is one of the leaders on the Russian market of theater and stage equipment supply, equipment for entertainment and sporting events. It works with the best manufacturers, such as Harlequin, Tuchler, Gerriets, Milos, ShowLED, Chain Master and others. The company delivers the facilities and does the installation.

Stefco was looking for ways to increase its profits and expand sales. As a part of this plan, the decision was to upgrade the company’s web-store to the latest 4.10 nopCommerce version supporting .NET Core with further intention to migrate the shop to Linux hosting.

STEFCO had a few requirements to the new site:

Improvement of the admin area (more user-friendly with better responsive design)
A possibility to migrate to Linux hosting in future
Better in-store pickup support
Performance optimisation

While planning the upgrade, two significant challenges were identified:

nopCommerce source code and database of the existing site (on nopCommerce 3.70 version) was considerably modified, which made it impossible to upgrade using the normal process
Custom plugins required additional modifications to be compatible with the new version of nopCommerce

See the website: STEFCO >>

ISDK team analyzed the store version used before to find out nopCommerce source code changes. Third-party plugins were checked as well. The areas that required an action to be taken were identified, the following activities needed to be performed:

Implement custom SQL scripts to make a copy of the database without custom modifications
Move all customizations from nopCommerce source code to custom plugins
Review and update existing custom plugins to support the new version of nopCommerce
Perform regular upgrade process from updated 3.70 setup to 4.10 using upgrade scripts
Change custom theme and plugins configuration settings after upgrade to reflect changes in nopCommerce platform and to use new features available in new versions of the theme and plugins

The challenges that were initially discovered, were successfully solved and the transition from 3.70 to 4.10 went very smoothly. While performing the upgrade, all data and settings were persisted and traffic loss was minimal. The requirements outlined by STEFCO were met, the store is now also ready for future migration to Linux hosting.
This case reflects well-known issues related to the nopCommerce source code and database customization that cause difficulties with a regular upgrade process and require extra activities before starting an upgrade. At the same time, it demonstrates how using built-in nopCommerce plugin system can be successfully used for such customizations.