Step 1: Approach and Preliminary Analysis
Your requirements are then analyzed and draft of a preliminary osCommerce solution is prepared taking into account all your current business needs, and allowing for certain flexibility to grow along with your business in the future.

We aim to process all enquiries of our customers in 2 business days time, but due to high workload sometimes it may take a bit longer - you will be notified about the delay in such case.

Step 2: Analysis and Negotiations
Dependently on the complexity of the project we may require to contact you several times to discuss different parts of the proposed solution.

At the end we prepare Acenet's osCommerce Development Proposal. osCommerce Development Proposal is an official and confidential document that contains your business requirements and Acenet's proposed business solution based on osCommerce. Where possible we will recommend you our already existing modules and services. Or, just bespoke Drupal design and development services if we do not have an existing module yet to address your particular business needs.

Acenet's Drupal Development Proposal also contains our price quote, estimated project completion time, terms and conditions of service. We would normally send you a PDF copy of the proposal unless you require a hard copy too. This is where the Negotiations process is started. We never quote our customers anything extra trying to oversell our osCommerce products and services. We quote a fair price and provide our customers with realistic time frames.

Step 3: Contract
Your osCommerce Development project with Acenet will be more likely covered by a special agreement with Acenet - our Custom osCommerce Development Contract. The Contract defines the scope of the project, responsibilities of the two parties - Customer (yourself) and Developer (Acenet team). It is a pretty standard document and its aim is to ensure that the two parties can work together in the most efficient manner, being legally protected from any possible misunderstanding and confusion.

Step 4: Project Planning and Management
As soon as the contract is signed, you will be introduced to your osCommerce Project Development team. The team would normally consist of your Drupal Project Manager, osCommerce Test and Quality Control Engineer, osCommerce Web Designer, and sufficient number of osCommerce Development Experts.

Your osCommerce Project Manager is your main point of contact with Acenet. You will be given Project Manager's direct phone number, email address, and instant messaging account details.

After that your assigned osCommerce Project Manager will prepare a Project Plan for you. The Plan will contain all project-related tasks, will identify milestones (if more than one) and will demonstrate when our osCommerce Development Team plans to complete the whole project or its parts. Acenet’s osCommerce Project Plan will help you to plan your own workload, marketing campaigns, etc. The Plan needs to be signed off by the Customer (yourself) first before the developments can be commenced.

Step 5: Development and Quality Control
Once the osCommerce Project Plan has been approved, we will commence with osCommerce Development on your project. This step will require almost no involvement from your side.

All development is performed in our development office. We do not outsource projects to other companies or individuals, neither do we employ any part-time osCommerce Developers. All our osCommerce Developers are qualified full time experts, who have been already involved into development of a number of osCommerce online stores.

Acenet's osCommerce Development Experts follow the development technology according to the Open Source nature of osCommerce. This means that all our online stores are Open Source, and the source code can be viewed and edited at any time later on by yourself or another qualified osCommerce Developer. Development is being held on our own development web servers.

Your Project Manager controls the whole process and communicates with the team members. osCommerce Test and Quality Assurance Engineer is involved on every step of the osCommerce Development process to ensure everything is designed and implemented according to your requirements.

From time to time (according to the Milestone Schedule) your osCommerce Project Manager will ask you to review certain parts of the online store on our development server and let us know your comments, if any. This is required especially on larger projects to ensure that the project is moving in the right direction, and that we can proceed with implementation of further features and design elements.

Step 6: Project Acceptance
When the osCommerce development process is completed, our Test and Quality Assurance Engineer will thoroughly test the online store according to previously confirmed osCommerce Test Plan.

Once the online store has passed our tests, we will ask you to review it on our demonstration web server and confirm all your requirements have been addressed according to the osCommerce Proposal and osCommerce Project Plan.

We will then upload the osCommerce online store to your web server and configure it properly. We are always happy to host online stores of our customers on our web servers, please do not hesitate to let us know if you'd like to use all benefits of our professional osCommerce Hosting.

Step 7: Maintenance and new projects
The project is then over, but not our business relationships with you as our Customer.

First of all you are entitled to all benefits of our osCommerce Maintenance service. It is not limited by time, and we promise to fix anything that could have been caused by our programming free of charge and in timely manner during business hours according to our workload.

Secondly, should you have any new ideas or requirements - just let your Acenet's osCommerce Project Manager know. We will be glad to work with you on new projects at any time. Many of those osCommerce online stores that we developed several years ago still send us their new requirements once in several months. And quite often our Drupal Business Analysts come back to our customers with new business improvement ideas too.