Building a Merchandise Store for Riot Games

“We want to do what?!” I exclaimed, the first time I heard we wanted to start up our own merchandise store. We’d launch multiple ecommerce sites. With international shipping support. In 13 languages. All at the same time. It sounded crazy.

OF COURSE I WAS IN.

Greetings, everyone! My name is Jason Rose, and I'm a web developer who plays so much Malzahar every 4th line of code I write summons a voidling. The Riot Games merch store is an inspiring project with some incredibly fun technical challenges, ranging from enabling a flexible localization pipeline to hosting multiple international environments. We’ve created merch that captures many of our favorite aspects of League of Legends, and I was thrilled to help build the means to deliver those goods to players.

Early on, the Merch Team chose Magento as the foundation for our ecommerce platform. In order to handle the expected scale and be able to rapidly ship content, we made some radical changes to the platform. Along the way, we learned some great lessons, which we shared last April at Imagine Commerce, a Magento conference. Now, I’m excited to share with you that presentation.

Hopefully, web developers approaching large projects that touch on scale and internationalization will find my talk useful. If scaling website volume isn't your thing, the preso also covers tooling for efficiency and dev-ops strategies for zero downtime deploys. This presentation carries an ecommerce focus, but also encompasses general web practices that can apply to a multitude of projects. Enjoy the beard presentation!