Development of a store connection to Tyre Shopping PRO

OXID eShop interface programming for www.Felgenstore.de

The Allgäu-based online store www.felgenstore.de (Immenstadt) sells alloy rims and tires from all well-known manufacturers and provides its customers with professional advice on the selection of suitable alloy rims, tires and complete wheels. In addition to many years of experience, the rim store offers everything a driver's heart desires: tires, alloy rims, complete wheel service, balancing, laser analysis, fitting, chip tuning and much more. To expand the product range, eWorks was commissioned to develop a store connection to "Tyre Shopping PRO" from Tyre24 GmbH (Kaiserslautern) in order to integrate their stock of more than 5 million tires and rims into the web store.

eWorks developed an individual TYRE24 connection for the tire and wheel store, tailored to the needs of its client: newly available tires and alloy rims are downloaded fully automatically and imported into the online store, while price changes and other item updates are recognized and transferred to the store - any duplicates are thus avoided from the outset. Using a powerful filter, the store operator can interactively restrict which tires and alloy rims (e.g. based on manufacturer or price category) are to be imported into the store - and which are not. In order to minimize article maintenance, all article data is downloaded and imported in full into the online store: various prices and article texts, but also brand, model, number of holes, tire type, tire dimension, width, rim diameter, speed index, profile designation and much more. In particular, product images are also downloaded, scaled programmatically to the required size and imported fully automatically into the store. In addition to the article images themselves, so-called "tire labels" are also imported, which visualize all tire information as standardized graphics. Last but not least, product groups or store categories are automatically calculated based on manufacturer information and other article attributes, created if necessary and the imported articles are sorted into them.

The icing on the cake was to not only import the countless tires and alloy wheels and offer them for sale in the online store, but also to intelligently link them together to enable complete wheel sales: Tires together with matching alloy rims as a set. Since neither every tire fits every vehicle type, nor every tire fits every rim, nor every rim fits every vehicle type, this resulted in an enormous number of possible combinations of different vehicle types, tires and rims, which the store system must know and manage in order to recommend compatible tire-rim combinations for store customers' vehicles.

As not all store customers are familiar with the bolt circle, hub diameter, aspect ratio, etc., the online store has been expanded to include a tire finder and a rim finder, which can also be used in combination to suggest suitable complete wheels. After selecting the manufacturer, vehicle type and year of manufacture (or model), the online store automatically suggests suitable tires and alloy rims. As the huge range of over 5,000,000 tires and rims means that countless tires, rims and complete wheels come into question, the search result can be filtered interactively by store customers - e.g. by manufacturer, design, width, diameter, offset, color, etc. Store visitors who find this too much choice will be gently shaken awake after a few minutes of inactivity: "Haven't found a suitable rim yet? Give us a call!".

Despite the maximum degree of automation, manual maintenance options were also created in the OXID eShop administration area, which allow the client to manually intervene in the developed automatisms. For example, it was ensured that both stock items and other types of items can still be set manually and are not overwritten, updated, deleted or otherwise processed by the Tyre24 import. Furthermore, a maintenance interface was developed and integrated into the OXID admin area in order to view the newly introduced article properties such as width, diameter, offset etc. and to be able to edit them manually if necessary. Last but not least, the button for initiating an import process has also been integrated into the store admin area - so that "everything is in one place".

A particular challenge for the software development was the client's wish to be able to operate the web store technically independently of TYRE-24 so that the store would still function even if TYRE24 were to fail (e.g. due to maintenance). In terms of programming and data storage, this meant storing all data in a local cache. It was not so much the approx. 30,000 tires and 50,000 alloy rims themselves that proved to be problematic, but rather their compatibility with the approx. 2,000 different vehicle types and with each other. The theoretically possible number of approx. 3 trillion (!) possible combinations of tires, rims and vehicle types fortunately only exists in theory, but even the practically relevant number of approx. 1.7 billion combinations proved to be a real challenge for storage space and performance in the project context. In the end, an optimal compromise between storage space requirements and performance was found and successfully implemented through software optimizations, data refactoring and a more powerful web server, without overstretching the project budget.

eWorks was responsible for the technical planning and implementation from the start of the project through to the successful launch of the TYRE24 interface. The interface programming itself was carried out using PHP and MySQL, the same technologies on which the underlying store system OXID eShop from the Freiburg-based eCommerce experts OXID eSales AG is based. The integration into OXID eShop was carried out using individually programmed OXID modules, while the import process itself was carried out using an automated, nightly rule process (cronjob). In order to be able to trace the complex processes and decisions of the import process, logging was built into a log file for security reasons, which can provide information if required. The existing store web design was expanded to include new operating elements for the tire search, rim search, complete wheel search and tire label display - so that everything looks "as if from a single source".

Following completion of the software development, the rim store connection went online at www.felgenstore.de in summer 2014. Following commissioning, eWorks supports its client in an advisory capacity, carries out functional enhancements on request and rectifies any defects as part of its two-year warranty.