40+ million car parts in one B2B shop
Body Parts OÜ from Tallinn sells original spare parts for more than 40 car brands online. With the Aimeos #gigacommerce extension, the shop imports 40+ million items within two hours and still finds any part number instantly.
About
bodyparts.ee is the online shop of Body Parts OÜ, a company from Tallinn, Estonia, founded in 2014. It sells new, original spare parts and body components for more than 40 car brands, from Alfa Romeo, BMW and Mercedes-Benz to Toyota, Volvo and Volkswagen. The shop is available in Estonian and English and serves workshops as well as private customers.
Original parts are identified by the manufacturer's part number, and every brand offers hundreds of thousands of them. Together with the parts from different suppliers, the catalog quickly grows to tens of millions of items, and prices depend on the supplier and the customer group. A shop system for this business must import huge supplier lists quickly and still let customers find the right part in a second.
The web application
We started with Magento and ran into massive problems when importing products. Importing the complete product set from CSV files took days, and many products weren't imported at all but silently dropped. Three weeks before the go-live deadline, we decided to drop Magento and looked for an alternative that was capable of:
- importing at least 10 million products within a few hours
- scaling to 100 million products and more
- offering dynamic prices based on customer groups and suppliers
- showing prices to logged-in users only
- searching fast for product codes and variations in the frontend
- managing items in the backend without delay
- checking European VAT IDs against the EU VIES system
Aimeos was the only option that promised to cover all requirements, and the #gigacommerce demo with one billion items was very impressive. Customer group prices and VAT ID checks are standard B2B features of Aimeos, and the #gigacommerce extension takes care of importing and searching the huge catalog. Two weeks before the deadline, Aimeos GmbH created a proof of concept that convinced us Aimeos was the solution we needed.
Based on the proof of concept, we built the complete shop with the Aimeos Laravel eCommerce package within two weeks, and the site went live on time. Aimeos was fully customizable: we only had to adapt the templates to our design and configure Aimeos using the available settings.
Results
Today, we import 40 million products within two hours, which is far better than expected, and Aimeos doesn't even break a sweat when customers search for part numbers or when we work in the admin backend. Choosing Aimeos for our ordering platform was the best decision ever!
Next, we are expanding our business to more countries and languages. We will also connect more payment, delivery and order systems using the interfaces Aimeos already offers.
Screenshots
Implemented by:
Aimeos GmbH
Aimeos GmbH supports digital agencies and software development departments with their expertise in building custom online shops, complex B2B applications and marketplaces using the Aimeos open source e-commerce framework. It offers customization and implementation of features, developer support and the #gigacommerce extension used by bodyparts.ee.