etachki.com® is a high-volume automobile buyer who offers fair and transparent car valuations based on knowledge of the used car market and expert diagnostics. The etachki.com service eliminates all the issues connected with ordinary selling the vehicle, e.g. buying and creating ads, conversations with interested buyers, showing car to them, payment delays, document arrangement, etc. This buying service provides users with the opportunity to sell used vehicles for cash, make more money while saving time and expenses.
The etachki.com website allows visitors to receive instant and free online valuation (by entering some basic information on their vehicle) and get preliminary offer to buy this car, as well as option to schedule an appointment at the nearest buying service location for a free, fair-deal sight inspection and price valuation. Superior customer service, state-of-the-art valuation technology, and fair deals ensure the effectiveness of etachki.com service.
Project Overview
Responsive Plone Theme with multilingual content
Quintagroup implemented the Plone 4.3-driven theme based on the provided design. We used a light-weight and modular Dexterity content type framework. Since the main goals of the theme were accessibility and user-friendly interface, it is responsive and automatically adjusts its UI elements and design to accommodate any size and type of the device it can be browsed on. This ensures a smooth website display and improves user experience.
Valuation application is the most important feature of the idea behind the etachki.com. Using it visitors can get a quick price valuation of their used car. So we made sure that it is easily accessible from any website page.
etachki.com website is available in two languages: Ukrainian and Russian. Bilingual content and all translation features were implemented using plone.app.multilingual. This Plone package added user-friendly UI tools for content translation management. plone.app.multilingual allows choosing languages that will be used and creates root folders for each of them so that visitors will be comfortable with navigating the website in either language as well as switching to the appropriate translation of web page at any moment. This add-on is representative of an advanced Plone multilingual engine. It provides an easy way to add new content, translate it to other languages, edit it using babel (parallel) view, navigate and manage translations of the content.
How the website operation looks like to visitors and clients
On the outside, the process is as simple and user-friendly as possible. Users visit the website, insert necessary information into the form (make and model of a car, year of its production and other details on its current state) and receive an approximate price that they can get for their used car. Then they choose the most convenient date and location for the on-site inspection. A qualified person will inspect the car and assign the final price. Easy. But what goes on behind the scenes?
How the website operation looks like For Programmers
To ensure this smooth operation on a programmatic level a lot of technologies and applications were combined into one system. First of all, there are four main software components involved in the project:
- the main website etachki.com visited by users
- back office for the work with clients
- valuation system, that consists of:
- information and ads from the open car-selling websites
- ads classificator that identifies and classifies cars based on ads
- using ads classification database and coefficients system to determine an approximate price for a particular car
- analytics: analysis of ads and coefficient settings to ensure proper car valuation.
Other components are an SMS provider used to send SMS notifications confirming meeting details and email marketing service SendWithUs. The latter allows marketing specialists to control the mailing process and experiment with email content, monitor email performance and metrics, analyze and increase engagement, test new ideas and content using A/B testing.
Enterprise Service Bus
The integration of these and other parts of the project into one functional system was built on Enterprise Service Bus. The ESB is a modular and component-based architecture that is meant to support business processes. The ESB coordinates interactions, exposes and invokes services of the integrated systems so that only one access method needs to be defined between each system and the ESB.
The main tasks of an ESB are:
- monitor and manage routing of communication between services;
- control deployment and versioning of services;
- serve commodity operations like event handling, data transformation, and mapping, security or exception handling, etc.
If any of the components undergoes a rewrite or is split between departments or vendors, ESB can be easily adapted to the change. This will not influence other components of the system and their interface with ESB. So it is easy to replace components (e.g. change of SMS provider took only two hours) or add new ones (e.g. add CRM or ERP systems for managing valuable customer data).
Other technologies that were used in the project
- Angular was used for work and interface of valuation application, while Django was applied for its backend.
- PostgreSQL was chosen as a management system for object-relational ads classification database.
- The database and website are hosted on Amazon. To classify ads we needed large capacities and big Random-access memory. Amazon provides a powerful server perfect for this particular task. Moreover, it allows switching server on for 15 minutes every day and paying only for their usage.
- Zato assists in building and orchestrating integration services, enhances intercommunication across applications and data sources.
- Bootstrap is a powerful front-end framework, styles, and functionality from which provide faster and easier web development.
- Scrapy was used for screen scraping and web crawling.
- Varnish is an HTTP accelerator developed to speed up content-heavy dynamic web sites.
- OpenRefine is a powerful tool for working with large amounts of data, including its cleaning, format transforming, and linking it to databases.
- quintagroup.seoptimizer was used for enhancing Search Engine visibility of a Plone site. This product was customized to suit etachki.com requirements, e.g. h1 tag change.
- collective.geo - Plone package that allows to geo-reference Plone content types and to display this information over a map. Quintagroup customized this product to suit etachki.com specifications and added a marker’s style to display information about each branch.
- Google tag manager allows marketing specialists to add or update website tags without involving developers. It is quick and intuitive and provides an opportunity to experiment with tags and measure results without influence on website performance.
Due to Quintagroup's persistent and efficient work, the new website is now successfully running. All clients' requirements were implemented and they are satisfied with the resulting solution.
Interested in learning more?
Quintagroup is a seasoned provider of web solutions and can give expert advice to assist your business or organization online. Contact us today to learn more.