MyMyCars

The story of competitive car retailing service creation

About

Industry: Automotive Retailing

Location: Ukraine

Type of software: Marketplace

Scope of work: IT consulting, Back-end, Front-end, UI/UX Design, Quality Assurance

MyMyCars is an online service for the sale and purchase of new and used cars.
According to the сlient, at that time, a monopoly of one particular service dominated the Ukrainian car retail market. At the same time, the attitude towards customers on their website left much to be desired.

Many useful functions were absent, and the platform itself was full of paid features, although services in other countries offered these functions to users without any fees.
Our client set the goal to correct this situation by creating modern service with a user-centered approach. What results did we manage to get? Scroll down to find the answer!

Technologies

Challenge

Create an automotive marketplace that will be intuitive, convenient and easy to use for different types of target audience

Win competition against the market leaders

Requirements

It was necessary to develop a single comprehensive solution for car owners and dealerships.
The application should be able to place offers for the purchase/sale of cars.
The app should perform an interaction with financial institutions (insurance companies, banks, etc.)
The application should include various additional services e.g. functionality for buying car reports.

The app should include a personal profile page with an ability to compare cars, add them to favorites, and other options for profile editing.
The application should be able to form custom lists of cars users favorited in their personal profile pages.
The application should have a news block for community-building purposes.

Key functional
features

Develop a rotation system that displays in the top offers which contain more complete information about the car.

Implement an ability to sign up for a test drive via the platform for the fastest possible interaction between seller and buyer.

Implement a system that provides recommendations for similar car models and competitive models comparison.

Implement a top-selling cars display feature where cars are ranged by category e.g. bodywork type, classes, and other criteria.

Create a system for car selection with both manual and automatic filters.

Implement a news feed to the platform allowing community members to interact with each other.

Implement a system of automatic filling in of information about auto through interaction with state databases.

Implement an opportunity for dealers to place promotional activities.

Project Team

Project Workflow

Having formed a team and approved the tasks to be done, we started to work and it was something like this.

The team was captured at work at the very beginning because each participant understood the colossal responsibility. We understood that this is not just the site for car sales, but the application, that covers all areas related to cars. That’s why there were a bunch of ideas and concepts that provoked long discussions during brainstorms.

STAGE 1. Discovery

We discussed with the client ideas, requirements, and desired competitive advantages;
Conducted comprehensive work on competitor analysis;
Created a list of potential functionality based on the client's brief;
Approved the strategy of creation, development, and implementation of the platform;
Evaluated the necessary resources and works to be carried out during development;

Well, since the requirements are approved, it’s time to start working on prototypes.

STAGE 2. Design & Prototyping

As a designer, I was quite interested, although, in fact, the work wasn’t always easy. This is a rather large-scale project, and the main task was to make the site, despite its multifunctionality, clear and easy to use. At this stage, I got familiar with the project, did UX research of competitors in the automotive industry, then started drawing prototypes to represent all the functionality. As a result, we have a modern, bright and easy-to-use product, which is gaining momentum every day.

And then we coded relentlessly like there is no tomorrow.

STAGE 3. Development

Once the prototypes and technical specifications were approved, the senior developer created the architecture of the project;
Leading developers have created and approved the architecture of databases;
The development team decided on the optimal and modern technological stack;
All tasks were divided into sprints according to Scrum methodology;
We discussed with the client the priorities of tasks in order to start working on the most important parts in the first place;

After the sprints, we showed the client a demo of the developed functionality;
We conducted daily meetings 2 times a day (morning and evening) with the team;
We conducted weekly meetings with both the client and the developers (sprint planning and retrospective);
Have set up a productive interaction with an external devops team during which we held working meetings and retrospectives;
We continue working on the project, preparing new functional blocks.

The advantage over competitors is that this project is SPA (Single Page Application). Actually, because of this, a user’s first visit to the site is a little longer than usual, but further navigation is almost instantaneous. You don’t need to download a new markup, as only dynamic data is uploaded. One of the most difficult tasks was the implementation of filters that are used literally everywhere in the project. There are also static data collections for information that rarely changes, which allows you to access the serverless and keep it all on the front-end side.

Results

Having formed a team and approved the tasks to be done, we started to work and it was something like this.

We have implemented a system of adding cars to favorites and comparing them for a better user experience as well as a car selection system for the convenience of users. Also, a system of recommendations has been implemented so that users have more choices.
The application has a rotation system on board, which displays the most complete ads at the top.
The application has a function of displaying news for community building.
It is possible to request a test drive of the car you are interested in.
The display of sales leaders has been implemented so that users know about the best selling car brands.

The possibility of creating profiles both for ordinary users and for business has been implemented, which makes the system more convenient. Also, the possibility of adding offers and viewing the added offers both from dealerships and from traders and regular users has been implemented.
The application has the possibility to receive reports on cars, thanks to which the buyer can always verify the truthfulness of the information posted by the seller.
The ability to obtain website statistics on added users or offers for any period of time.

MyMyCars

About

Technologies

typescript

PHP

symfony

Node.js

Vue.js

DOCKER VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT

NGINX

Nestjs

Elasticsearch

HTTP REST API

postgresql

Redis

Challenge

Create an automotive marketplace that will be intuitive, convenient and easy to use for different types of target audience

Requirements

Key functional
features

Project Team

Yana

Svitlana

Olena

Olena

Dmytro

Roman

Dmytro

Ihor

Sergii

Oleksandra

Oksana

Project Workflow