Hauthaler Vertriebs GmbH’s: A Story of Transforming the Online Presence of KTM’s Official Moto Dealer in Austria

Hauthaler Vertriebs GmbH is the official Austrian KTM dealer. KTM is an Austrian motorcycle and automotive manufacturer which was established in 1992 and now is one of Europe’s largest motorcycle manufacturers.

Challenges

Hauthaler Vertriebs GmbH came to nopStation with its ktmshoping.at website built on nopCommerce version 4.20. They requested several changes to its website including new functionalities, optimizations, and UI changes. After an extensive audit and R&D process, nopStation ide ntified key development challenges for this project.

Migrating FactFinder Search Services to Solr: Previously the website utilized FactFinder for search services, which is a search service provider that enables extensive search features such as fast indexing, predictive search, and auto-completion. In order to optimize the search experience on their storefront further, they wanted the search to be migrated to Solr hosted search in order to facilitate these changes. The challenge was to find a way to integrate Solr services while also accounting for their existing site data and functionality.

Handling SEO-Friendly URLs for a Multi-Store System: An additional challenge of FactFinder search migration to Solr was handling search result URLs. As these URLs come from their own database, nopStation’s team had to develop a way to bind these URLs to product data from nopCommerce and also fetch SEO-friendly URL data to build SEO-friendly URLs for the search results pages.

Developing a Custom Parts Finder Module: A major development requirement from the client was the development of a spare parts finder feature for their website. This presented a significant engineering and development challenge as the searching and filtering had to account for the category, year, bike model and variants, frame parts, and engine parts. They also requested that the parts should be visually mapped with the spare parts manual for a more immersive shopping experience. As this requirement was quite abstract, it presented the team with significant R&D challenges.

Creating a More Adaptive and Informative Product Details Page: The client wished to create a more adaptive and contextual bike finder feature. They wanted customers to have the ability to save certain bike models and configurations for repeated searches. They wanted this functionality to be available for both registered and unregistered customers.

Adding an Estimated Delivery Range to Products: They had requested showing estimated delivery dates for products based on product availability date. They wanted the estimate to be between 3-10 working days and handle weekends for calculation.

Developing an Adaptive and Optimized UI: Besides purely functional changes they requested several UI enhancements on their website and faster loading times. Our team used its UX expertise to conduct R&D on implementing a more intuitive UI/UX for these enhancements while also increasing loading speeds.

Post AG Integration for Shipping: With the website being targeted at its Austrian customers, they requested support for Post AG as a shipping method. Our team had to find a way to develop a way to add Post AG services to the website.

Solution

To achieve all of the development requirements for the project, nopStation went through an extensive analysis and breakdown of the business requirements and in-depth research to finalize its development strategy for the total project. Having to work with an existing codebase, the team decided to utilized mostly a custom development approach on top of the system to implement all of the new functionality.

Developing a Solr Hosted Search Plugin: To enable Solr search services on their storefront, nopStation’s team developed a Solr Hosted search plugin for them. This plugin helped preserve their existing search functionality and facet data while also adding various optimizations and features enabled through Solr such as typo tolerance, anagram-based search, customer search results ranking through facets etc. Moving to Solr also helped them take more control over their search services as it is an open-source hosted service as opposed to Factfinder that helped them optimize costs as well.

Developing a Parts Finder Module: To handle the challenge of building accurate product pages and SEO-friendly URLs, the team developed a custom URL builder that binds search results and URLs with data from the website’s nopCommerce database. The URL builder utilizes product-id mapping to fetch accurate product data and SEO-friendly information to build a custom search results page.

Spare parts finder module

Adding Visualization and Mapping for Spare Parts on the Parts Manual: The next significant development challenge was adding visualization in the spare parts search page to highlight the parts, default buying quantity, and assembly information. For implementing this feature, nopStation’s team conducted extensive R&D and trials to develop a coordinate-based mapping for each part of its bike manual. When the mouse hovers over a specific part on the parts list or on the spare parts manual image, it shows the part's name, price, and base quantity of purchase. The pop-up includes a quantity adjustment and an add-to-cart buttons for added accessibility. This created a more intuitive UX and increased usability significantly.

Visualization for spare parts

Adaptive Bike Finder with Bike Model Saving Feature for Faster Searches: nopStation’s team developed a custom bike finder module with the feature to save bike models for registered and unregistered customers. A registered customer can save bike models after or during a search. When a bike model is saved, it shows up in a carousel under the search menu.

Bike finder with bike model saving feature

With this module, for repeated searches, a customer can simply click on a saved bike model from the carousel. The bike search is also adaptive as it searches contextually based on pages. For example: on the accessories page it’ll search for accessories compatible based on the bike.

Implementing UX Enhancements with CDN Integration for Faster Load Times: We developed several UX enhancements for the UX/UI of the website. For adding dynamic content, the team developed an Elements plugin that lets admins add content such as banners, custom links, reviews, parts finder info, featured categories, etc. to specified widget zones, this plugin allowed for extensive customization for the website with efficient management from the admin side.

Adding Content through Elements plugin

To ensure faster loading times, nopStation’s team decided to use CDN services for offloading website images. To enable CDN integration, a CDN integration plugin was developed for the website. This plugin offloads images to a CDN server to optimize webpage loading times. This approach increased loading speeds exponentially for the website.

Adding Estimated Shipping Times for Products: To show the estimated shipping information for products, nopStation’s team developed an estimated shipping time feature based on product availability. This feature accounted for local weekends and holidays for showing estimation dates between 3-10 working days from product availability. Each product's estimated shipping date range is shown on the cart and checkout page.

Developing a Post AG Shipping Plugin: For enabling shipping services across Austria with Post AG, nopStation developed a plugin for Post AG integration. Developing a Post AG shipping plugin from scratch took significant development time & effort. This plugin lets admins easily create shipments for Post AG and generate Post AG shipping labels which are downloadable for more enhanced shipping & delivery management.

Results:

• Parts finder module with active visualization
• Solr hosted search plugin to optimize storefront search
• URL builder to convert and bind SEO-friendly URLs
• Bike finder module with contextual searching
• Improved webpage load times using CDN integration
• Estimated product shipping date feature based on availability
• Shipping services through Post AG integration plugin

nopStation is the #1 Gold Solution Partner of nopCommerce and an eCommerce wing of Brain Station 23 Ltd., a top-ranking software development company with a global presence. Team nopStation designs, builds and enhances eCommerce solutions on top of the nopCommerce platform for clients of all business sizes. The company has technology partnerships with 12+ leading ISVs including Microsoft, Google, and AWS. The company help its customers build their business online by developing the right eCommerce solution using nopCommerce at a competitive price and reasonable timeline.