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LifeLabs is a Canadian-owned company that has been serving the healthcare needs of Canadians for more than 50 years. Each year, they perform over 112 million laboratory tests to help diagnose, treat, monitor and prevent diseases for millions of Canadians. Headquartered in Ontario, their multifaceted business allows for general diagnostic tests, naturopathic tests, and genetics tests that all help their customers make more educated decisions about their health and the future of their treatment.
Introduction
While redesigning their website, LifeLabs.com, the company wanted to incorporate a high-performing e-Commerce solution for ordering and processing medical tests online. It had to include two key components: a user-friendly and easy-to-use frontend user interface that can be easily embedded on any website and a backend application for managing orders, serving the results and requisitions for the customer.
Problem
There was no ready-made solution on the market that would meet the customer’s business needs.
Solution
Build custom eCommerce platform using secure, robust, and reliable technology.
Unique requirements
The client needed more than just a standard eCommerce solution. They wanted to provide a convenient shopping experience that would allow customers to purchase different products from multiple sites seamlessly, provide easy access to conduct payment services online and be able to see all their payment history.
Technology analysis and selection was a crucial step in the solution design and and we had to come up with a technology stack that would meet standard system requirements and meet specific features to ensure:
- Infinite scalability and sustainability
- The ability to embed the frontend widget in any company website
- Compliance with PCI standards without additional costs and development of custom solutions
How we built it
We worked closely with LifeLabs business analysts and IT specialists in the discovery phase to gauge their actual needs accurately. Using an Agile, iterative process, we involved their team every step of the way. This allowed the client to monitor and verify deployment at every significant stage of the project so they could see how the project was progressing and make any necessary changes before the next deploy
Convergine team conducted a comprehensive analysis and decided to develop and implement an eCommerce solution using the Azure Cloud platform. To achieve the goal in alignment with all requirements, we choose the following technological solutions:
- Implementation of FrontEnd on Angular application for the frontend
- For data storage, we choose the following technologies:
- Azure CosmosDB, as the primary database for the entire system
- Azure Redis Cache as the fast temporary storage of incomplete orders
- Azure Blob Storage for results and requisitions documents
The combination of CosmosDB / Redis Cache allowed to optimize the cost of data storage and transaction processing significantly.
Technological Features
- Azure Functions serverless computing enabled us to achieve cost-effectiveness and flexible scalability. The premium pricing tier guarantees a high degree of communication isolation and security.
- Storage account queues & queue trigger functions were used to ensure the asynchrony of long-running tasks.
- Bambora Payment Gateway, its API, and client JavaScript libraries were used as payment gateway.
- To monitor the health of various system components, we used Azure AppInsights accessibility tests as a simple but, at the same time, effective tool.
Results
- The Convergine team helped LifeLabs make a robust and cost-effective eCommerce solution by using Azure Cloud and implementing several new features to secure business performance and enhance customer experience.
- The system allowed LifeLabs to continue meeting its customers’ needs by offering an easy-to-use service and performing as a reliable and trusted partner.
- The platform proved reliable and highly scalable for order processing during the pandemic in 2020 when it administered COVID tests at Vancouver Airport and, six months later, at land borders processing thousands of orders per day.
- The Azure Cloud platform confirmed its state-of-the-art high status from the chosen solution standpoint, and based on our experience and results, we recommend it as a PaaS solution for high-load systems.
