Hauthaler Vertriebs GmbH’s: Transforming the online presence of Gas Gas’s Official Dealer Shop in Austria

Hauthaler Vertriebs GmbH is the Official Dealer of Gas Gas in Austria. Gas Gas is a Spanish manufacturer of off-road motorcycles established in 1985. They specialize in building off-road bikes for competitions specializing in endurance and trials. Its off-road bikes are imported across Europe and other countries around the world, such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South America, South Africa, and the United States.

Challenges

Hauthaler Vertriebs GmbH approached nopStation with its website for the Austrian market, built on nopCommerce version 4.20. They requested the development of several new features and extensive optimizations for the UX on their website. nopStation’s team had to conduct an extensive analysis and auditing of the website source code and requirements to identify key development challenges.

Migrating from FactFinder to Solr for Search Services: Previously, their website utilized FactFinder, a search service provider offering features like fast indexing, predictive search, and auto-completion. To enhance their storefront's search experience, they opted to migrate to Solr hosted search. The task was to seamlessly integrate Solr services while preserving existing site data and functionality.

Managing SEO-friendly URLs for a Multi-Store System: Another challenge during the migration from FactFinder to Solr was handling search result URLs. Since these URLs are sourced from their database, the team devised a method to link them with product data from nopCommerce. Additionally, nopStation implemented a mechanism to retrieve SEO-friendly URL data to construct SEO-optimized URLs for the search results pages.

Developing a bike finder feature for repeated searches: They wished for their customers to have the ability to save certain Bike models and configurations for repeated searches. The challenge was to develop a way to integrate this functionality into the search feature.

Developing a spare parts finder module: One of the most challenging development requests from the customer was developing a spare parts finder function for their website. The searching and filtering had to account for bike terrain, category, year, bike model and variants, frame parts, and engine parts. They also requested that the parts be visually mapped with the bike manual image on the parts for better visualization.

Displaying estimated shipping period for the product: 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.

Creating an optimized UI with faster load times: Besides these purely functional changes, they requested several UI enhancements on several pages and faster loading times. The team used its UX expertise to conduct R&D on implementing a more intuitive UI/UX for these enhancements while also increasing loading speeds.

Adding support for Post AG: For the Austrian website, they wanted to have support for Post AG as a shipping provider due to its extensive delivery chains across Austria. Adding support for Post AG services presented an additional development and logistical complexity.

Solution

To establish a development roadmap for the gasgasshopping.at project, our team conducted an extensive R&D and audit of the requirements, existing website, and codebase. We utilized a custom development-driven approach for adding new features and enhancements on top of the existing codebase.

Developing FactFinder module with URL builder: The team developed a Solr Hosted search plugin to enable Solr search services on their storefront, preserving existing search functionality and facet data while incorporating various Solr-enabled optimizations and features such as typo tolerance, anagram-based search, and customer search results ranking through facets. Transitioning to Solr provided them with greater control over their search services, being an open-source hosted service, which also optimized costs compared to FactFinder.

Additionally, to address the challenge of building accurate product pages and SEO-friendly URLs, nopStation crafted a custom URL builder. This builder seamlessly integrates search results and URLs with data from the website's nopCommerce database, utilizing product-id mapping to fetch precise product data and incorporating SEO-friendly information for the construction of a tailored search results page.

Developing a parts finder module with parts visualization: A major development challenge had been to develop a custom parts search module. We had to conduct significant R&D to not only develop a search UI that was optimized for bike parts but also integrated parts manual visualization. We built a search module that lets customers search for parts based on terrain, category, year, bike model and variants, frame parts, and engine parts.

Spare parts finder

The next part of this challenge was adding visualization with the bike parts manual to highlight the parts, their quantity, and their placement. Extensive R&D and trials helped to come up with the solution of a coordinate-based mapping for each part with its manual. When the mouse hovers over a specific part on the parts list in the bike manual image, it shows the part's name, price, and base quantity of purchase. The pop-up includes a quantity adjustment button and an add-to-cart button for more 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: The 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

Creating an estimated shipping date feature for products: In order to display estimated shipping information, nopStation’s team had to account for Austrian weekends and holidays as well as product availability. They implemented an estimated shipping feature that can calculate a shipping estimate between 3-10 days based on these parameters. The estimated shipping information is displayed on the cart page and the checkout page for added context. The estimated shipping information acts as additional product information for customers and creates a more intuitive shopping experience.

Estimated shipping range

Building UX enhancements and integrating CDN for image resources: The team implemented extensive UX enhancements for their website. Custom popup-based views for taxation and privacy policies were developed to create a more immersive shopping experience. For optimizing web page load times and images, the team developed and integrated a custom CDN plugin that offloads images from the website to a CDN server. This helps increase loading speeds significantly and added more efficient management for image resources.

Developing a Post AG shipping plugin for shipping integration: To enable Post AG shipping services on the website, a Post AG shipping integration plugin was developed. Developing the plugin from scratch took significant development time and effort from the team. The Post AG plugin lets the admins easily add Post AG as a shipping provider and create Post AG shipments. The plugin also generated Post AG shipping labels and the ability to download them for added flexibility.

Results:

• Robust parts finder module with active visualization
• Solr hosted search plugin to enable an enhanced search experience
• URL builder to generate and bind SEO-friendly URLs from FactFinder data
• Increased website performance through the CDN integration plugin
• Estimated shipping range for an enhanced shopping experience
• Post AG shipping integration through plugin development

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.