Case Study

Building an Automotive Dealership Platform

Custom build of a full dealer web management platform handing vehicle inventory, e-commerce, email routing and ad campaigns.

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Project Overview

Grand Touring Automobiles (GTA) is the premier exotic and luxury car dealership in the Greater Toronto area. GTA was looking to create a new web experience for their online users to set them apart from the competitors, their existing website was stale and used a common automotive listing platform. Additionally they were looking to take control of their online listings to allow quicker updates rather than relying on a 3rd party to make site changes.

My Role

I had the pleasure of directly leading this project from the RFP response and bid process, through ideation and design, development and finally deployment and post launch support. During the course of the project brought in two designers, two developers, and QA resources. We worked closely with the GTA internal staff and third party vendors to understand GTA’s needs, and integrate with their processes. My role in included leading the both the business and client relationship, and the design and development direction ensuring that we were able to solve the client needs within the budget and time allowances.

Solution

After a detailed analysis of client needs, business requirements, and the existing off-the-self products landscape, it was determined that we would design and build a bespoke website and listing display platform on the Django framework.

To begin we dove into all available user research and interviewed the internal team to fill in blanks around the existing business requirements. It was quickly determined that data accessibility would be an issue. We identified that the automotive vertical, not generally employing local development teams, relies on SASS companies to store and distribute all core vehicle inventory. After further digging into this subtle but key twist it was found that the SASS providers do not allow vehicle dealerships such as GTA direct access to their data, instead requiring access to only to 3rd party service providers. To resolve the issue we needed to become a certified 3rd party service provider and create our the new GTA website as a generic SASS platform. Though this pivot was unexpected, this type of technical understanding gap is common in business today as the rate of technical advancement outpaces the sophistication of internal teams. Identifying and recognizing these gaps in knowledge early is key in keeping projects such as this on track.

With our initial pivot successfully navigated we set out to begin architecting the solution for our client, GTA. As we now are required to build a system which will pull our core data from a centralized source Dealer Inventory/Management System, and will not be able to push changes back up it was key to the client to be able to make quick changes at the website level without waiting for DMS changes or requiring them. Additionally though vehicle inventory is stored within the DMS system there was no information stored or available for new vehicle models and brands, as a key differentiator for the GTA brand we wished to provide bespoke vehicle model information pages. With this need for both editing vehicle information and model pages at the web level we began designing a custom, user-friendly, interface for the sales and marketing team to use.

Designed to be Unique

Our concept for the site was to be fresh and unique. It needed to showcase the unique styles for each brand sold by GTA while maintaining a crafted luxury feel. We analyzed the competitors in the space reviewed each manufacture's site for brands sold by GTA. Common amongst these were the deeper palettes focusing on single brand colours combined with black tones. Looking to bring similar styling to the GTA we brought a black heavy greyscale colour pattern for GTA allowing brand colours such as Rolls Royce’s Purple and Aston Martin’s Green to pop. To continue our focus on premium we invested additional time into ensuring the transition patterns for reveals and interactions were smooth and carried appropriate weight. Together with this was a regular review and balance of design against acceptable branding standards for the various manufacture brands. This visual focus pushed us to work in more visually complete styling in our design rather than traditional low fidelity wireframes but allowed us the ability to ensure the visual weights were balanced before moving to development.

Figure: Excerpt from the design file for menu brand display.

Figure: Excerpt from the design file for vehicle details.

Site Management

Our design for the custom site management pages leveraged the Django admin framework as as a base, on it we designed and added a robust brand, model, and dealership management system allowing GTA to update their website to add new locations, brands, and models while respecting each individual brands unique branding-guild lines. This was all completed through a user friendly back end system.

Through the backend system the marketing team was now able to manage all of their online vehicle listings, making changes in real-time as needed rather than wait on inventory pushes from their DMS. Additionally we were able to provide GTA with systems to:

Allow easy to modify systems to allow GTA to customize the brand pages and vehicles pages for each manufacturer to fit their individual brand visual requirements;
Manage dealership physical locations;
Create and manage inline promotional ad units on the site;
Manage contact email routing;
Supplement listings with image based spin visuals;
Manage team member contact information;
Manage job listings.

E-Commerce Portal

Along with the launch of the new primary website, we additionally launched a new Shopify based web portal for merchandise sales. With the new e-commerce site we looked to streamline the process for selling and shipping GTA merchandise. This process began with team interviews speaking with members of the Parts department and anyone with responsibilities in the merchandise fulfilment team. Quickly we identified similar limitations to what was experienced with the primary vehicle listings; merchandise inventory was once again stored in the centralized DMS system with restricted access by our client GTA.

Processes were mapped out, cases considered, and quickly it became apparent that though an fully automated inventory purchase and shipping system was a shared vision for the team, the number of special cases and overrides required would push the cost of such a system beyond it’s value. As merchandise sales is very secondary to the GTA business, a simpler more adaptable process was selected. We continued to use the power of the Shopify platform for product display and order placement, but shifted the final packaging, delivery, and inventory tracking to remain manual allowing for the unique needs of GTA to be met at a cost effective price-point.

Learnings

Automotive vertical had evolved to provide businesses only limited ownership of their data, instead data is generally centralized in industry specific hosted platforms database. This has likely evolved due to the limited internal team technical knowledge in the Automotive vertical.
There are no accessible true repositories of vehicle model data, solutions exist to attempt to bridge the gap such as VIN expanders however vehicle specifications do not follow standards and so even the collected information in these expanders is not consistently represented.
Complex and fully automated systems fit real world scenarios like a round peg in a square hole. Often times it is better to reduce automation to ensure processes and procedures match the client needs.

Impact and Results

Launched website had immediate impact on costs associated with the hosting of the website. Existing contracts with service vendors were cancelled in favour of the new cloud hosted and internally controlled site.

Site, being fully controllable via a custom backend interface, allowed the marketing team to quickly manage brands, models, trim-packages with minimal effort and each creating a ’crafted’ feel. Additionally they were delighted with the ability to make quick adjustments to the live inventory to allow for new contact email routing, price overriding, and fast inventory wording changes of anything that may slip through from their DMS. The customizable brand pages have been a hit internally and also have passed all brand manufacturer guidelines for representation on the web.

The e-comm site, after some initial hiccups which allowed us to find new initially unrealized special cases was tailored to meet the needs of GTA and has been key to expediting delivery of parts and swag items purchased through the web portal.

Site has run seamlessly with 99.95% uptime and no internal issues since launch in Q1 2024. On turning over the website to the long term support vendor who was experienced in the automotive vertical they commented on how amazed they were that the system ran without any issues maintenance other than standard dependancy update.