Multiple markets, one website platform

A customer within the automotive industry offers an online sales platform for reliable used cars. Since sales are promoted on a public website, it was important for the brand to have a platform for its website that paralleled their guarantee of quality. The aim was to provide customers with a comfortable experience while increasing its visibility in search engines at the same time. By migrating the website to Heroku, a scalable cloud application platform (Salesforce App Cloud), Arlanis Reply enables the users of the sales platform a smooth start into their customer journey. In addition to a competitive platform with high visibility, the client was looking for a partner capable of assisting with new market roll-outs. The company expected a quick and agile realization and implementation of changes and new requirements. The launch was driven by increased brand acceptance in more than ten various markets around the world.

Challenges

The customer’s website previously had an extremely complex architecture and older technology that required months before changes could be implemented. The architecture also included many different systems that required new developments. Overall, it required very precise project planning right from the start. Additionally, they were looking for a scalable solution that enabled easy roll-out possibilities for new websites in different countries and in different languages.

Requirements

  • Manage multiple markets in one application
  • Upload dynamic content from multiple content management systems to one content page - making it easy to customize different elements
  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for high ranking on the search engine results page (SERP) with content adapted for web crawlers
  • Short deployment cycles for new features (New version live every 2 weeks)
  • High scalability provided by Heroku Cloud platform
  • Configurable websites enable changes within minutes through specially developed application built on Salesforce
  • Almost never offline time (99.99% online) during edits and deployment

Solution

The solution was a single platform for all markets with a highly configurable front-end. Arlanis Reply also implemented comprehensive search engine optimization (SEO) measures to ensure that the website is well ranked in the search engines. The solution combines a Cloud App (on Heroku) along with several Content Management Systems for front-end elements, administration tools (Salesforce) and service-oriented structure for data sources. This enables the content to be seamlessly displayed in real-time onto the website on the front-end. Results allow changes to be made with a click of a button within minutes, compared to months on the previous system. It also allows troubleshooting without downtime nor the entire website going offline.

A Sales Cloud component was also included as an object model to configure the markets with a planned wizard function. This accelerates all processes if a new market is to be “created” quickly. Even in different languages, with particulars like the view of the front-end can be adjusted without much effort, allowing for a highly scalable possibility for multiple domains. Through all these measures, Arlanis Reply was able to establish a comfortable User Interface, along with a secure connection, for both the client and the end customers.

Results

Since implementing the new PaaS with Heroku, the customer could see measurable changes. With the implemented SEO measures and a new UX, the website extended its reachability through SERP. In achieving these solutions for the client, Arlanis Reply approached the projects using an agile project method with short release cycles that emulated an agile start-up company. Every two weeks new features on the website are deployed, always staying up-to-date. Efforts of previous markets are easily duplicated with a few minor changes. These factors together enabled a website that changed the visitors’ and potential clients’ perception of the website.