From brochure site to a store that serves dealers too
Confidential · Automotive Retail
The business said
- “Refresh the static product website”
- “List the catalog on a marketplace instead”
- “Buy an off-the-shelf storefront”
- “Keep dealers ordering by phone and fax”
- “One store where customers and dealers each see their own catalog and their own price”
Retail buyers and dealers did not need two systems. They needed one storefront that knows who is looking at it.
An e-commerce platform with role-based differential pricing, on a CMS backbone
A mobility manufacturer's web presence was a brochure: products to look at, nothing to buy, and a dealer network ordering through offline channels. The obvious moves were all partial: refresh the site, join a marketplace, bolt on a standard storefront. None of them solved the real requirement, which was serving two very different audiences, retail customers and authorized dealers, from one platform without leaking either one's pricing to the other.
We built a single store that adapts to its visitor. Access is location-aware and role-aware: a retail customer sees the consumer catalog at consumer prices, while an authenticated dealer sees dealer pricing and dealer stock. A mapping integration locates the nearest dealer for customers who want to buy or service locally, keeping the network inside the loop rather than cut out of it.
Underneath, the platform was engineered for retail-grade load: a highly normalized database design kept queries fast as the catalog grew, inventory is managed end to end through the content management system so business teams run the store without engineering tickets, and scheduled reporting plus web analytics give every stakeholder their numbers automatically.
In production the store searched its catalog in under a tenth of a second while processing around four thousand transactions a day. One platform now carries the brand's retail sales and its dealer channel, each seeing exactly what they should and nothing they should not.
- under 0.1s, product search
- 4,000 a day, transactions
- customers + dealers, audiences
- role based, pricing
- CMS, no tickets, store ops
