Automotive Spare Parts Distribution / B2B & B2C E-commerce

Client is an automotive spare-parts distributor moving its wholesale operation onto a unified digital platform. The business supplies parts across dozens of categories — engine, suspension, brakes, and more — sourced from 50+ recognized manufacturers, to both individual buyers and wholesale/dealer customers. Before this platform, catalogue and pricing data lived in per-supplier Excel spreadsheets rather than a single system of record, and wholesale customers were served through manual or offline channels rather than a self-service storefront.

Client needed to take a catalogue in the 2–3-million-part range — previously tracked in Excel — and turn it into a searchable, price-accurate, self-service platform, without losing the wholesale pricing relationships already negotiated with different customer tiers.

• Migrate the client's spreadsheet-based parts catalogue (10M+ SKUs) into a single searchable, indexed database
• Build a comparison/sync pipeline that cross-references external supplier data against the client's own inventory, including alternate/replacement part numbers
• Implement customer-group-based wholesale pricing so every logged-in customer automatically sees their own negotiated price
• Launch a public storefront for direct ordering, alongside a bulk search/export tool for wholesale/dealer customers
• Support OE-number and cross-reference part matching across brands and multi-currency operation

Success criteria

We built Client as two coordinated applications: a Next.js 16 storefront (React 19, App Router) for customers, and a Laravel 12 API paired with a Filament 3 admin backoffice for catalogue, pricing, and order management — connected over a REST API secured by Sanctum tokens. The engineering centerpiece is the data pipeline: turning a 10–12 million row Excel-based catalogue into a live, searchable, per-customer-priced database.

Key capabilities

The platform is a modular monolith split across two deployable applications — a Next.js storefront and a Laravel API with an embedded Filament admin panel — backed by MariaDB, Redis, and a dedicated Meilisearch service, with Laravel Horizon monitoring the import, indexing, and export queues.

The implementation replaced a spreadsheet-based catalogue and manual wholesale pricing with a searchable, self-service platform enforcing pricing automatically per customer.

• Parsing and importing XLSX files at a 10–12 million row scale, where pure PHP parsing could not keep pace with the client's data volume
• Bulk-loading pricing data without database timeouts or lock contention across millions of rows
• Reconciling part numbers formatted inconsistently across suppliers and scraped sources
• Scoping the scraper against evolving client requirements — which price takes precedence, whether to scrape alternate/discontinued parts, and how far the crawl should extend

For import performance, we stepped outside PHP's native XLSX tooling and built dedicated C++ binaries against the xlsxio library purely for the parsing step, keeping the rest of the pipeline in Laravel. For the database load itself, we used MySQL's LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE with indexes disabled during the insert and a temp-table join for price linking, rather than ORM-driven row-by-row inserts. Part-number inconsistency was solved with a dedicated normalization column and console command. Requirement ambiguities around the scraper were resolved through direct, documented client Q&A captured against the project plan.

• Laravel Sanctum token authentication for the customer-facing API, separate from the Filament admin's own session guard
• Spatie Permission + Filament Shield role-based access control on every admin panel resource
• Bulk search/export functionality gated behind dedicated backoffice-access middleware
• Google and Facebook OAuth (Socialite) offered as an alternative to password-based login

• Frontend search/autocomplete (typeahead, faceted filters) to match the backend's Meilisearch capability
• Multi-language storefront rollout alongside broader multi-currency display
• Online payment gateway integration, moving beyond the current invoice/offline-payment order flow
• Expanding scraper coverage to additional supplier/reference platforms
• A defined migration path for existing customers from the client's prior portal onto Client

• Willingness to build custom tooling (C++ parsing binaries, raw bulk-load SQL) when standard framework tooling hits a genuine scale ceiling
• Experience designing tiered B2B pricing logic that's enforced server-side, not bolted on as a display-layer convenience
• Full-stack capability across Next.js, Laravel, and Filament, needed to deliver a storefront, API, and admin backoffice as one coherent platform
• Milestone-based delivery with requirement ambiguities resolved through direct, documented client conversation rather than assumption
• A pragmatic approach to data engineering at scale — chunked concurrency, disabled-key bulk loads, and normalization strategies suited to a 10M+ row catalogue

Client needed to turn a spreadsheet-based, 10–12-million-part catalogue into a searchable, self-service wholesale platform without losing the pricing relationships already negotiated with its customers. Client replaces manual catalogue reconciliation and pricing with an automated pipeline: a purpose-built import path brings the data in at scale, a scheduled scraper keeps it reconciled against external sources, and every customer automatically sees the price that applies to their tier.