Redesign of the German eCommerce Platform for Car Price Analysis

Client

We connected with the owners of a platform that provides professional used car price analysis, generates leads, and real-time market data for the used car businesses.

Project Description

Our customers is a multi-product company that provides aggregated information for car market users. The info on their problem contains all data about new and used cars, for the current day as well as for previously listed advertisements. Information is present on the websites as well as provided by API or downloaded as PDFs.

Information is aggregated from main selling websites, where dealers and other persons list their advertisements about cars they want to sell. Each country has its own set of providers supported. By default, the main country for search is Germany with providers mobile.de and autoscout24.

The platform is responsible for showing reliable data that matches the providers' numbers and selected parameters. Different types of users use different products depending on their needs. Customization for these products is added if major customers ask for it.

Elinext engineers were hired to find weak spots in the platform, fix them, and add new features. As the platform is over 10 years old, there were plenty of adventures with legacy code and weak spots. More on that in the next chapter.

Challenges

The platform has been in the market for quite some time, and some of the features were outdated. Here is the list of the business objectives we were puzzled with at the beginning of cooperation with our clients:

• Get technical and business knowledge of the project to mitigate team location risks.
• Move servers to another location according to German and EU laws.
• Review processes and productivity of the existing team, review estimations and do QA of the product.
• Speed up the process of development of new features.

As you can see, the initial pain points of our client were the slow development speed and the lack of reliability on the project.

Pain points (slow development speed, lack of reliability with estimations) were pre-existing problems on the project. Here are what qualities of Elinext developers helped us to deal with these challenges:

• wide experience of the developers in this field
• team lead experience
• good communication skills
• excellent problem-solving skills.

Process

The project required a lot of collaboration with both the client and their internal team of development. Team meetings were about onboarding and architectural discussions.

The business meetings related to re-visiting processes and the overall vision of the project.

Here is the timeline and staff for the project

Sept 2023

We started our cooperation with one senior full-stack joining the project after completing quite a complex test task. He was onboarded and started communicating with the dev team and business.

Oct 2023

QA joined. The main tasks completed during that month: re-visiting testing flow and task workflow defined.

Nov 2023

DevOps and Senior front-end developer joined. They worked on the server migration, splitting the application, and updating its parts.

Feb 2024

A back-end developer joined. We finished preparations for the server's move, added more front-end and back-end features.

The project is ongoing.

Solution

The main goal of the first phase was to find weak spots in the project. Soon our engineers found out that the project contained a lot of legacy code with little or no documentation related to the technical or business side.

Task navigation, estimation, and priority already had been examined and this resulted in an upgrade of task flow and estimation process.

Due to the lack of documentation and outdated source code, there were several expected issues with re-structuring the project and adding new features, for example, the limitation of parser service throughput. All these issues have been resolved during the work.

Upgraded and more reliable processes inside the team:

• moved application servers to a new provider
• got knowledge of deployment for backup as the previous client’s outsourcing team was unreachable
• added critical features that were postponed because of a lack of resources.

The solution is operating on the new servers and some of the new features are deployed at the moment.

Results

The project is still ongoing, but some results of our cooperation are already noticeable.

New features were delivered on time. The servers were moved, but with the overdue for a month because of the complexity of connections between services in the previous architecture.

We brought a lot of value to the platform with our consultation and expert opinions on the project, our client got clear feedback. Few long-awaited features had been implemented.

Our engineers added the features that allowed the client to get new customers, optimize, and add new providers to expand the geography of the project.

For our engineer, it was an excellent exercise in rebuilding a legacy project and close communication with a customer.

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