Oxid eShop for a Giant Automotive Enterprise: Challenges and Solutions

We have already noted in one of our expert articles that the choice of an e-commerce solution has a tremendous impact on the future success of an e-shop. Thus, it is important to assess how the available functionality, performance characteristics and scalability options meet the needs of the project.

Nevertheless, it also happens that no platform is readily able to meet peculiar needs of the project. This was the case in one of the projects we have been working on, where OXID eSales has been chosen to develop an eshop for a giant corporation having hundreds of thousands of products on offer. Thankfully, our expertise with OXID helped customize the platform to client’s needs and improve the performance.

Background 

The OXID website has been set up for one of the world’s largest manufacturers of vehicles and spare parts. The company has been a supplier to automotive industry and its suppliers worldwide and meant the website to be used for both B2B and B2C marketing. Although Oxid eSales offers great functionality for e-commerce, it did not allow to effectively manage such a great number of products and implement specific business logic peculiar to automotive industry.  

Challenges  

To make the website correspond to the scale and ambitions of the owner company, our OXID experts had to improve the performance and the structure of the website, organize the hierarchy of products and customize product search.

Here are the challenges we stood up to:  

1. Resolve performance and speed issues stemming from large weight of product catalogs; 
2. Create comprehensive catalogs with hierarchical organization of all products. Here, it was important to take into account peculiarities of the industry, as the same title may stand for spare parts to different vehicles or the same spare parts may have different titles depending on the region of use; 
3. Customize search on the website so that users can search for products using the last four digits of the VIN numbers, which is common for the industry and help to make sure the chosen spare part is exactly the one the user is looking for;
4. Make changes to the structure of the website adding custom pages and additional menus on product pages;
5. Allow adding custom posts and announcements on the website’s home page without braking the layout of the page.  

Provided Solution  

Agiliway has managed to implement all the necessary changes to allow a giant enterprise successfully work via a popular e-commerce platform – Oxid eSales. In particular, our engineers have made the following improvements:  

• Resolved all performance issues increasing the speed and improving user experience with the website;  
• Built catalogues with a comprehensive hierarchy for hundreds of thousands of products;  
• Optimized the search so that products can be searched by their various titles and last digits of VIN codes; 
• Developed a custom page with a number of users’ wish lists. Such solution allows users to have a separate wish list for each of their cars and easily access all the items they need to buy or have bought for each of their cars;  
• Rewrote the modules of filters and menus for them to display on the pages of individual product; 
• Created custom widgets for presenting news and updates. Using the widgets, admins of the website can easily change and add new content without breaking the layout of the page.  

Value Delivered  

Due to strong expertise in OXID, Agiliway has managed to make the website market ready and customize the solution so that it is a good representation of the giant in the automotive industry.

Precise search through well-structured catalogs helps users quickly complete their purchases and be confident in the correctness of their choice, which has promoted customer satisfaction and retention. Superior user experience and excellent performance of an e-store strengthens the brand of the manufacturer and contributes to sustainable growth of he company.