Automotive Products e-Commerce Solution Development Process | Case Study

Challenge
Approach
Description
Screenshots
Result

Challenge

SCAND web application development team was tasked to create an e-commerce software suite focused on selling new and used automotive products such as wheels, rims, and tires. The new and used auto parts inventory software was to be targeted to the European buyers and were to work for dealerships, businesses and individual car owners, corresponding to the needs of each.

On the side of individual clients (car owners), the platform was to provide the ability to:

add an item;
see the list of active/sold/purchased items;
see the statistics on sales;
add and manage payment information and data;
add and manage information on delivery (address, method, etc.).

As the platform was also to be a dealership software solution, there was to be a separate section that was to allow:

looking through expanded statistics on sales;
seeing and managing information concerning subsidiaries and employees who had limited rights to access and manage the account, as well as seeing statistics on it;
adding items that will be available to all clients;
adding items that will be available to B2B sales only;
creating, managing and operating groups of items;
making bundle purchases.

The auto parts shop software was also to provide its users with the ability to apply various filters on searches, including searching by item’s characteristics (size, type, manufacturer, dimensions, load and speed indexes, colors, etc.), searching for similar items, and searching for items for a certain model of car.

Approach

The process of the new car parts e-commerce platforms’ development included consideration and implementation of the following:

The platform was based on the modern JS framework — Vue.js.
To adhere to the purpose of the platform, shorten the development time through parallel work on different services and to ensure the easy scalability of individual parts of the application, a microservice architecture was chosen.
The platform uses a CMS created by SCAND team in the way to allow managing its sections, as well as managing the list of web-pages and its components.
A public API was created for third-party developers, ensuring the ability to use the business-logic for building applications based on it.
Vue Injector — an open-source dependency injection library for Vue.js was created by SCAND team to perform dependency injection.
The platform was fitted with a mechanism that allows embedding the platform (or its parts) into third-party websites.
For effective crawler indexing, a server-side rendering system was built on Nuxt.
UI was based on Vuetify.
Vuex library was used for application data management as an implementation of Flux architecture.
The design was provided by the client and implemented by our team.
MVP was developed under a strict timeline to allow customers receiving clients’ feedback ASAP.
Deployment was build according to a continuous delivery scheme to provide seamless updates and zero downtime.
To handle high-load, the platform was based on AWS that ensured the ability to scale up instances quickly.

Description

The e-commerce trade platform for automotive products can be used by different types of users, including dealerships, businesses, and individual car owners. The developed auto part sales software takes into account the needs of each type of user and provides different functionality tailored to their specific needs. For example, there are some slight differences in functionality between individual clients (car owners) and businesses/dealers.

All users of the platform can:

add items they want to sell and see the list of their active/sold/purchased items;
look through statistic on sales;
manage information on delivery (address, method, etc.) and information on the payment method;
apply various filters on searches, including searching by item’s characteristics (size, type, manufacturer, dimensions, load and speed indexes, colors, etc.);
search for similar items, and search for items for a certain model of car. In cases when search produced no results, it is possible to subscribe for a certain search parameter, so the system will automatically inform a user via email when search results will change.

When it comes to accounts of businesses and dealers, there are some additional functions, such as:

access to the expanded statistics on sales;
ability to see and manage information concerning subsidiaries and employees who had limited rights to access and manage the account;
adding items that will be available both to all users or to B2B sales only;
creating, operating and managing groups of items, as well as making bundle purchases.

Screenshots

Result

Acting as an e-commerce solutions company, SCAND created an e-commerce trading platform where dealerships, businesses, and individual car owners can buy and sell new and used automotive products.

To correspond to the requirements, the C2C/B2B/B2C e-commerce software solution was fitted with user profiles and roles, the ability to add, import and export items, search by a filter, view information on a certain item, make payments.