Our Services & Process.

We pride ourselves on our technical ability, transparency and communication skills. Whether you are technically minded, or not, we speak your language.

Our services are a process. We are with our customers through every step of a project; starting with consultancy to design solutions, development to deliver those solutions, integration to add value, and support to ensure stability and availability.

Click the diagram to see a detailed example of how a project typically flows from start to finish, and read below for more details about each service.

Ampersand Commerce took the time to understand the scope and complexity of the SKINS business, creating bespoke add-ons within the Magento platform to handle multiple warehouses, price lists, languages and product display requirements. Grant Bayley, CTO, SKINS

Consultancy

We’re a trusted source of expertise to international multichannel retailers. We work with customers to identify problems and design solutions.

A successful project starts with a strong partnership which is built by trust and transparency. First, we get to know your brand and your business goals. Then, we work together to design solutions that deliver measurable value, optimise business processes and leverage the full capabilities of Magento Enterprise. Whether you need to assess the feasibility of a new Magento-based solution, or reach an impasse with their current solution and need guidance on how to move forward, we can help.

Magento Enterprise Consultancy

Solutions Architecture
Code Reviews
Feasibility Studies
Infrastructure Audits

Project Discovery

Statement of Works
Technical Specification
Functional Specification

Programme Management

All of our projects involve a high level of interaction with external agencies including UX, design, SEO, SEM, marketing, social media and copywriting. We have a deep understanding of how these functions fit within a project, and manage all aspects as part of delivery.

For further detail, download brochure>

Development

We truly understand Magento, multichannel and ecommerce. We develop robust systems for delivering elegant, scalable solutions to complex customer requirements.

Our development method is based on transparency, communication and defined milestones. Because of this, our customers trust in our ability to deliver extensible, scalable solutions. We do all the things you’d expect of an enterprise-focused development house; we use Subversion to store incremental versions of development changes and an automated deployment process for development, staging and production environments. We create defined, measurable projects that are divided into distinct work packages. These are broken down into appropriate cases in our bug tracking system, giving our Project Managers a clear basis on which to deliver updates to customers.

Our Process

Internal Coding Standards
Daily "Scrum" Meetings
Versioning (SVN)
Sprints
Continuous and Automated Testing
Performance Testing Post-deployment

We are committed to excellence, from both a technical and delivery point of view. The senior development team and management team meet regularly to review potential improvements to our processes - ultimately benefitting our customers.

Joseph McDermott, Senior Developer
Ampersand Commerce

Project Management

Our project managers make sure a project stays on track and within budget, managing priorities, timelines and expectations. We follow a combination of the PRINCE2 and Agile methodologies. PRINCE2 guides the project through a controlled, well-managed, visible set of activities to achieve the desired result, while Agile development encourages transparency and enables rapid and flexible response to change.

Meet our Project Management Team

For further detail, download brochure>

Integration

We have a robust, testable framework for systems integrations. We work with customers and industry partners to build and integrate multichannel systems.

We have built a powerful framework for Magento integrations that allows us to develop robust, transactional interactions with other service providers. Using this framework we can extend, support and upgrade users of our modules. The framework also provides our customers with real-time transactional message history for all systems. We regularly build enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) and payment gateway integrations as part of larger solutions for our customers, and have exclusive agreements with a number of service providers to develop and support Magento integration modules for their APIs.

The Ampersand Integration Framework

Integrations We’ve Built

For further detail, download brochure>

Support

We offer monitoring and support through a dedicated team and automated systems. We ensure stability, availability and scalability for all of our customers, at all times.

We offer support packages to suit the needs of international multichannel retailers. We provide our customers with meticulous support and monitoring services for their operations, focusing on both preventative and reactive support. We use Zabbix to pro-actively monitor servers, environments and application layers. Zabbix monitors hundreds of server metrics, to pro-actively flag issues that could potentially prevent access to services or a degradation of the user experience. These findings are flagged by our team before they even cause downtime. If there is downtime, we use Pingdom for reactive monitoring. With Pingdom, any problem with your website will be discovered the minute it happens and our team will respond within your SLA.

Our support packages include business as usual (BAU) to cover small change, a dedicated Helpdesk for you to raise tickets and issues, and up to 24/7 support. We will work with you to choose the right package for your business.