Transforming Wheelership from Webshop to Enterprise Marketplace
The client
Wheelership is a family-owned business that began as a local tire and rim shop and has since grown into a leading marketplace for OEM, replica, and aftermarket automotive parts and accessories, serving both retail customers and a network of wholesalers across the US.
Wheelership partnered with Magecom for digital transformation aimed at supporting their rapid growth and complex business requirments.
Magecom delivered technical solutions that were highly aligned with Wheelership's business needs, enabling them to scale effectively while maximizing ROI.
B2C, B2B, marketplace
Automotive
Business challenges & solutions
Catalog expansion & Marketplace integration
Custom shipping module
Website speed & performance
Catalog expansion & Marketplace integration
The challenge
To grow and compete, Wheelership needed to expand beyond their original focus of tires and rims to fulfill across various product lines. The move would require significant financial investment and more exposure than Wheelership wanted at their critical phase of growth.
Our solution
Magecom helped transform the Wheelership platform into a hybrid-model marketplace to incorporate dropshipping and enable 3rd-party vendors to market and sell their products. Seamless integration of new suppliers would be crucial, and minimum downtime, critical.
Magecom helped automate vendor onboarding and catalog synchronization to meet strategic business objectives, including mitigating financial risk.
“Magecom supported our business and technical growth like an internal part of our team. They’re experts in their field and we’re grateful for their impact.”
Shipping estimation module
The challenge
With products being sourced from a network of vendors and warehouses, Wheelership marketplace grew quickly and customers demanded easy and accurate shipping. Complexity arose from the variety of supply chain logistics required by diverse vendors.
A robust and flexible solution would be needed to satisfy a broad range of requirements—including price and delivery estimates, stock status and location, and more—all of which would impact user experience and adoption.
Our solution
Magecom custom-developed a shipping calculator that leveraged real-time data to dynamically calculate and present the best available shipping. The solution aligned with key Wheelership objectives by resolving technical challenges, enhancing user experience, and growing sales and loyalty to optimize longterm ROI.
“Wheelership’s journey to scale is an example for any smaller merchant seeking to transform their business into an enterprise-level marketplace.”
Website speed & performance
The challenge
Wheelership began as a smaller online webshop and had grown to become a significant presence within their market. As operations continued to expand, their website experienced performance issues from increased traffic and transactional payloads. Their e-commerce ecosystem had grown to include a wide range of integrations, including ERP, marketplace, and 3PL, increasing the occurence of bugs, bottlenecks, and abandoned conversions.
Wheelership badly needed to fix website performance, but couldn’t risk sacrificing functionality or experience.
Our solution
Understanding that speed equals conversions, Magecom took a performance-first approach to website optimization, implementing the Hyvä theme and optimizing site-wide architecture to improve page load speeds and overall performance.
Wheelership underwent digital transformation to support rapid growth and satisfy complex business requirments.
A deeper dive for tech enthusiasts
To ensure that Wheelership's technical infrastructure could support their growing business, now and in the future,, we implemented a middleware solution designed to seamlessly integrate and manage the data flow between multiple systems and vendors.
The middleware solution was built using MACH architecture, or Microservices-based, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless. MACH provides highly flexible and scalable solutions, allowing components to be configured and deployed independently. The MACH-based middleware acts as the central hub—or "brain"—that manages complex interactions between Wheelership's Magento platform, ERP, and broad array of vendors.
How it works
The middleware solution connects Magento and ERP via custom-built adapters that communicate through APIs and are responsible for translating different data formats into a unified language that the core of DFA can process. Each vendor's data, whether coming from an Excel sheet or an API, is converted into a format that the middleware understands.
The "brain" then routes the data to the appropriate system based on predefined rules and schedules to ensure every piece of information is delivered accurately and timely.
Custom adapters for seamless integration
Given that every new vendor brought different data formats and requirements, we developed custom adapters tailored to each vendor's specific needs. The adapters handle the data transformation process, ensuring that all incoming information is compatible with Magento’s requirements. Once the data is processed and mapped correctly, it is sent to Magento to ensure the platform is always up-to-date with the latest product, inventory, and pricing.
The solution facilitated the smooth operation of Wheelership's marketplace and ensured the system could scale efficiently as the business continued to grow.
About us
How we own it
We love crafting success stories, one business at a time.
Success can mean many things. Yet, one of our favorite definitions is the peace-of-mind that comes from working with a true partner agency. With people who speak the same language to simplify the complex, and who always deliver on their promises. Our clients benefit from the highest-value e-commerce consulting and technical talent available anywhere in the market.
12 years in e-commerce
Organizational maturity is driven by processes.
Smart companies select a partner agency that demonstrates strong operational processes, along with the expertise to adapt them for specIfic client needs. We've enabled successful online sales operations across a range of industries and verticals, with clients leveraging our broad experience and deep knowledge base to enhance their market position and become trendsetters within their niche.
Engineering the future
We believe technology should serve people, and not the other way around.
The right technology can elevate your business to new heights. But you need an efficient and highly-effective technical partner to make it work. Our e-commerce experience runs broad and deep. From marketing automation to conversion optimization, and from business workflows to back-office system integrations, the solutions we deliver help you grow revenue and marketshare while reducing your total cost of ownership.
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