SVA Car Parts case study: a custom OpenCart store with MAM and VRM lookup

Body panels are the hardest kind of part to sell online. A front bumper for one Focus is not the same as the one for the facelift, and the wrong panel is an expensive return for a bodyshop working to an insurance deadline. Every product needed accurate fitment, side and specification data, not a supplier description.

The catalogue, stock and pricing all lived in MAM. Rekeying thousands of lines into a web store was never going to happen, and a store that showed stale stock or wrong trade prices would lose trade customers on day one.

The existing web presence did not rank for the searches that matter to a panel buyer: make, model and part type together. A generic category tree would never compete.

We built a bespoke OpenCart store with a two-way MAM integration, so products, stock, retail and trade prices flow from the back office to the site and orders flow back, with no rekeying. Trade customers log in for their own pricing; retail sees prices inc and ex VAT.

Finding the part is the whole job, so the home page leads with a number plate lookup that resolves the registration to the exact vehicle and filters the catalogue to what fits, with a year-make-model-body-style finder as the fallback. A price request basket handles the enquiries that still need a human.

The category structure was designed for search from the outset: make, model and part type combinations become crawlable, canonical landing pages, popular models and categories are surfaced from the home page, and product titles carry side, specification and insurance certification so they match how bodyshops search.