Roadzila is a one of a kind online marketplace created for automotive and tyre professionals. From its online B2B portal, the business buyers can find tyres, compare prices, and purchase them from various French and other European suppliers. Roadzila provides a single platform with the widest choice of over 700 tire brands, 80,000 references, and a stock of over 15 million tyres.
Roadzila basically wants to optimize and simplify the buying process for its B2B clients and further desires to build a commercial relationship between different parties of the tire market. You not only get the references from the most successful wholesalers but also save time on your purchases.
Because you don't need to make phone calls or visit countless websites to find availability and search for good prices here and there. You can find a specific set of tyres for different types of vehicle range such as- tourism, 4x4, van, motorcycle, quad, scooter, heavyweight, industrial, and civil engineering.
Allopneus is a French e-commerce company specializing in the sale and fitting of tires. The site Allopneus.com was created in 2004 and today it has become the market leader in the tyre sales in the French market.
Remy Baragione (Product Owner) and Benoit de Cuverville (BU Director: Marketplace) were both managing the Roadzila project. They wanted to do the complete transformation and build the Roadzila especially for tackling the B2B market segments- like garages, traders, tire specialists, and other related professionals.
Roadzila website was built on Magento 2 which is currently the largest open source e-commerce platform in the world. Due to the fact, Magento being a feature-rich and extensible codebase, Roadzila was customized to fit the needs of the B2B suppliers.
In this marketplace, all the products were to be created by Roadzila Admin (linked with Akeneo PIM) and available for all sellers for product assignation only. That means, the sellers won't be able to add new products, they can only add an offer on an existing product.
With the current module, product assignation to a seller or product modifications were only available via the frontend seller's account. Also, using API integration, the sellers managed their orders, shipments, and product catalog listing.
The frontend for the sellers was customized and several menu options and permissions were removed like - Add Product, Create Attribute, and My Product List. The sellers had to search for products using product name or attributes and then assign them for listing.
When a buyer log-in to the Roadzila store account, product list (according to categories) are shown. The requirement was - "In the product list (categories): We need a Webservice (AJAX request) to get all the sellers assigned to one product."
"When the customer clicks on one product, an AJAX request is sent and a list of all sellers who have this product on assignment is shown (with all the specific seller's details relative to the product: price, stock, information)"
With the help of Magento 2 Seller Price Comparision module, this customization was possible and implemented successfully.
A customized shipping calculation system was needed for Roadzila where the freight cost was based on the category, quantity, and postal zip codes.
"I need to update the "Marketplace Super Shipping Set" to add two features:
- Put a new parameter "category" to apply the shipping cost (fixed or free) only on some categories. This parameter will be a multi select-list with category of catalog.
- Upgrade the system to allow us to apply the shipping cost by quantity too. Currently, the interface allows us to define an interval with "price from" and "price to". We always need this feature, but sometimes we want to define an interval by quantity."
Once the customization work was completed, the sellers were able to create three type of shipping rates:-
- Shipping according to zip Range.- Shipping according to price Range.
- Shipping according to quantity Range.
Magento 2 Marketplace Web Services API module provides various functions to the store admin for exchanging and communicating marketplace data to other applications. You can manage sellers, product listings, orders, sales, shipments, credit memo, and much more functions are performed via REST API.
Remy Baragione wanted to have additional functions to be called via the Marketplace API. He wanted "to get order details of the seller to know the rules associated with the price and display all the data linked with the applied rule.
Also, wanted to get table rate shipping through API. Ideally get All and get by category within the post body the quantity and the price"
After understanding the workflow, two new additional API calls were created for the admin as follow:-
(i) Admin can get Assign products details according to the seller by seller ID through API.(ii) Admin can get applying shipping rule on the order by order id through API and it will return the Rules applied to the order.
It was requested to remove the payment and delivery information from the seller delivery note, customer delivery note, and the delivery email. Additionally, seller name was needed to be displayed on top of the page.
Benoit wanted to offer the possibility for a buyer and a seller to open a discussion from their own logged-in account panels. So when a user is logged in as a buyer - Contact Vendor button appears and when a user is logged in as a seller - Contact Buyer button appears.
Further, Google Translation feature was also integrated for allowing messages to be translated into multiple languages. Buyer/Seller Discussion functionality was achieved using Magento 2 Buyer-Seller Communication Marketplace Add-on.
With the help of Webkul One Step Checkout for Magento 2 module, the long checkout process was now customized to a single page. A buyer is now able to select a shipping & billing address, choose a shipping method and payment gateway from the single page. Webkul One Step Checkout module was also customized to display seller wise order.
Another very useful module was integrated on Roadzila website was Webkul Seller Locator Marketplace Add-on, allowing the buyers to search for the nearby sellers on the map. Seller Map Locator shows the location of physical stores via. Google Maps API.
Disclaimer - Please note all the images and content used in this article belongs to their respective copyright owners. If you have any issues or complains related to this article, please send us an email to [email protected]