SPL —
the first spare parts marketplace for special equipment

Instant search for the right product at the most favorable conditions

SPL is the first marketplace for spare parts for special equipment. Previously, there was no single platform on the professional equipment market where sellers of spare parts and owners of machinery and equipment could meet. And when the equipment failed to function, the owner or service company had to spend several days searching for the right part. At this time, the equipment was idle, the deadlines for the delivery of the project on which it worked were disrupted. The SPL marketplace is a modern solution that simplifies and speeds up the search for the right parts. It is easy to find spare parts on the site at the best price and delivery time.

Main goals

We were approached by representatives of a large mining holding, who also sell various special equipment (agricultural, mining, industrial, etc.). They noticed that there is no electronic platform on the market where sellers and buyers of spare parts for special equipment could meet. The client had an idea to develop a separate branch of his business: to organize a marketplace for the sale of spare parts.

At the same time, two problems of the market had to be solved. Firstly, it is difficult for the seller and the buyer to resolve issues on the supply of spare parts over the phone. This means that the online platform should solve the problems of buyers as fully as possible and make the interaction of participants more convenient. The second problem is that when special equipment breaks down, industrial or agricultural companies experience a downtime. This means that delivery time plays a major role in choosing a right seller.

At the time of contacting us, the client had developed a marketing strategy and design for the future marketplace. We had to functionally implement all the ideas of the client on the CS-Cart platform for marketplaces.

Our work process

1. We reworked the default catalog structure and search functionality

For each special equipment position there is always a catalog from the manufacturer, where parts and accessories for it are indicated. And when some spare part fails, you can easily order an identical one, knowing the article from the catalog. The marketplace presents tens of thousands of spare parts for hundreds of types of equipment. When a buyer comes to the marketplace, he knows the exact article number of the part he needs and the easiest way to find it is through a site search. Therefore, the refinement of the site search comes to play so that the search results are as relevant as possible to the buyer’s request.

The search for products is carried out only by the article number of spare parts. In order for the search to work as efficiently as possible, the buyer must first select the city in which he needs the products to be delivered. This is necessary so that the search engine can estimate the delivery time and then take it into account in the search results. If the buyer did not select anything, the system takes the buyer’s location by IP address as the default one.

So, the buyer enters the desired article in the search box. With partial input of the article, hints are displayed and you can immediately select the one you need.

The engine compares all products with the requested article by price and delivery time. In order for this to work, we have implemented a special formula that calculates relevance points for each product. The most relevant product is assigned the “Best Offer” status. This means that the product corresponds to the requested article, it has the best price and delivery time to the buyer. The best offer is displayed at the top of the search results.

2. Matrix of delivery times

In order for the system to be able to compare delivery times for products, for each product it will have to send a request to a delivery time calculator or an external service. The generation of search results taking into account such queries will take a lot of time when the selection happens among thousands of products. The buyer does not wait for the results and leaves. The delivery time matrix considers delivery times and does it as fast as possible.

When the buyer enters the site he selects the city of delivery. The matrix calculates in advance all delivery times from suppliers’ warehouses to this city. That delivery times are stored in CS-Cart and not on external delivery services. And when the buyer starts looking for a part, the system does not request data from external services, but compares the already available data in order to generate search results in a matter of seconds.

3. Placing orders separately by vendors

When a buyer needs to order several parts from different vendors or from different warehouses, it becomes necessary to place orders separately for each vendor’s products. This way you can save on shipping both in terms of time and cost. For example, it is more convenient for the buyer to take out the order from some warehouse on his own, and order a delivery somewhere else. It is also convenient for vendors when orders are placed separately, since they do not have to think about how to organize the common delivery of all the products. Each order goes to its own warehouse and is processed separately.

THERE ARE SEVERAL CONVENIENT FEATURES IN PLACING SEPARATE ORDERS FOR VENDORS AND WAREHOUSES:

You can place an order separately for each warehouse or vendor, or you can order everything at once. The buyer chooses what is more convenient for him;
You can add a different recipient for an order is the customer and the actual recipient are different people;
There is a progress bar that displays at what stage of the checkout the buyer is.

4. Ease of use for legal entities

Buyers and vendors on the marketplace are legal entities, so we added some improvements for their convenience.

Companies can only pay for orders through their bank accounts, so we removed the choice of payment methods from the checkout. After placing the order, it goes to the vendor and is checked there. When the vendor confirms the order in his admin panel, the “Print invoice” button becomes active in the buyer’s personal account

We also simplified registration for the buyer as much as possible: a legal entity only needs to enter a TIN. The connected DaData service automatically checks the TIN in the database and pulls all the legal data into the rest of the fields.

5. Financial accounting

The marketplace works on a commission model. This means that settlements are made between the marketplace and the buyer, and the vendor receives his money apart from the marketplace commission only when the order status changes to “Completed”.‎ To make it more convenient to work with accounting documents, we have extended the CS-Cart API for interaction with the 1C service of the marketplace.

Settlements with the buyer occur as follows:

The buyer places an order, the vendor confirms it. After that, the buyer receives an invoice for payment of the order by e-mail and it becomes available for viewing and downloading in his personal account. The buyer pays for the order through his current account. Then the accounting department of the marketplace sees information about the payment in 1C and processes the payment. Then data from 1C is loaded into CS-Cart: information about a successful payment, amount and order number. If the payment amount is correct (when it matches the amount of the order) then the order receives the “Paid” status. If the paid amount differs from the order amount, the error information is returned to 1C, and the order must be processed manually. Paid contract invoices from CS-Cart are uploaded to the cloud, from where they can be downloaded by an accountant.

6. Working time calendar

Since delivery time is the main criteria when selecting products, it was necessary to take into account the different working times of vendors in order to more accurately calculate delivery times. We have developed a calendar of vendors’ working hours: the main calendar is set up by the marketplace administrator, and the vendor can join it or fill in their own working hours.

If a vendor wants to use their own calendar with their working time, he must set it up on his own. As soon as the vendor clicks “Create” in the calendar settings, his individual calendar is used instead of the main marketplace calendar. When calculating the delivery time, the vendor’s working time will be automatically taken into account.

7. Email Parser

By default, the import and export of products in CS-Cart works through import presets: you need to set the correspondence between the fields of the uploaded file and the fields of CS-Cart once, and then simply import the file in csv or xml format.

This is what the test import preset looks like in the admin panel:

For service.parts store, we’ve made it even easier for sellers to import/export. The marketplace administrator sets up an import preset for each seller once, and sellers simply send the import file to the marketplace email. The email parser itself downloads the files and uploads them to CS-Cart. This is very convenient for vendors, their manual work is reduced to a minimum. Accordingly, there are also fewer errors when loading data.

Our work results

The SPL marketplace is ready to accept the first vendors and buyers. There is potential for scaling. We continue to cooperate and develop it, further simplifying and automating the work of vendors.
The buyer can find the product very easily, knowing the part article. At the same time, the search will show the best offer in terms of price and terms, the buyer does not need to compare it himself.
Despite the fact that you need to take into account the delivery time when generating search results, the marketplace works quickly thanks to the delivery matrix, which is generated in advance.

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SPL — the first spare parts marketplace for special equipment