If you sell spare parts, accessories or consumables on Prestashop, the need to be able to manage the compatibility or correspondence of these products with an appliance, machine or vehicle is no mean feat!
Finding a Prestashop module that is user-friendly and compatible with recent versions can be a... hazardous adventure!
This article will outline the advantages of EveryParts in this situation, offering a complete and simple solution for managing spare parts data on your online shop. Find out how this application can help you manage your catalogue easily and optimise your visibility and customer experience, while overcoming the constraints and limitations native to Prestashop.
What are the limitations of Prestashop when selling spare parts?
Product data
Whatever E-commerce CMS you use, there are no specific fields to indicate that the product sold is compatible or can be installed on a particular device, machine or equipment.
We often use :
- Product categories
- Characteristics
- Modifying standard Prestashop fields
- The creation of duplicate products
Shop performance is very quickly affected: slowness on the client side, administration loading problems, in other words, you often discover too late that you have made a mistake by choosing to bypass the standard functions.
If you use basket rules, promotions or other functions, the content of the database becomes a time bomb.
Visibility & SEO
In all this, we also know that the sinews of war lie on Google's battlefield. When you sell a product that can be adapted to 150 devices and you want to be visible on these 150 devices, you want to create 150 pages that are very often (too) duplicates.
Long live indigestion! In 80% of the cases we were able to study, the SEO wasn't great, as this method leads to the creation of pages that are very poor in terms of excessive numbers, making it difficult to rank.
The Customer & Merchant Experience
The search engine plays a decisive role in finding the right spare part, but the native search engine can quickly become saturated with data and adjusting its level of relevance is a difficult exercise. All the more so if the solution's native fields have been bypassed.
Errors in the information processed can often lead to product returns that are likely to be left on your hands. This can quickly have a detrimental effect on the user experience and can quickly lead to disappointment.
What is the best Prestashop module for managing and selling spare parts?
At the risk of disappointing you, a single module is not enough!
We have often found e-merchants who have used a super advanced drop-down menu module, based on the categories in their catalogue, or those who prefer to use the excellent modules from our PrestaModule colleagues: Advanced Search and Multi Features... But they are not suitable for processing so much data (which is even why we are partners!).
If not, there are other modules dedicated to spare parts, but their functionalities are often very limited, their support non-existent or they simply haven't kept up with the latest versions of Prestashop.
Back in 2010, we began distributing our Ukoo_Compat module, which already provided a number of functionalities to circumvent the common problems that an e-merchant can face:
- An appliance/vehicle database (such as make, model, year)
- An import/export tool
- A search system based on filters/steps
- A metadata generation system
- Display of compatible devices in the product sheet
But in all sincerity, this always led to very specific developments if we wanted to provide performance adapted to the constraints of each of our users' projects. It's not just a question of modules: selling spare parts or accessories is a complex business, and the volume of information to be processed can quickly prove astronomical. The other strategic point and major obstacle is data recovery and unification.
It is not uncommon to have several suppliers or manufacturers, in which case each one provides you with data in formats such as :
- CSV file
- FTP space
- XML feed
- Webservices
- PDF document
And all this with very different names and contents for the same appliance, equipment, machine or vehicle:
- Different criteria/columns
- Columns that are not in the same order
- Spacing
- Upper/lower case
- Different designations
- Different languages / translations
- Missing information
What are the advantages of using EveryParts?
By choosing to use a complete solution for managing your product data and spare parts on Prestashop that has been specially designed for this purpose, you will benefit from a number of advantages over your competitors.
A Prestashop module that respects the CMS standard
No toxic fiddling! The Prestashop module has been specially designed by certified developers to respect the fundamentals of this e-commerce CMS. What's more, this Prestashop module is easy to modify and adapt to your theme's current and future needs. Compatibility data is integrated so as not to alter your product catalogue with dedicated database entries.
A solid Cloud hosting infrastructure
To meet our customers' requirements, we have chosen a PaaS infrastructure hosted in Switzerland that meets the highest standards in the world of hosting.
From the BASIC package onwards, every customer benefits from a dedicated, privatised EveryParts instance for Security, Reliability and Confidentiality!
The icing on the cake: this infrastructure is hosted in some of the most environmentally-friendly data centres in Europe.
A powerful search engine thanks to Elastic Search
With a database unified around a high-performance search engine like Elastic Search, your users' queries are faster and more accurate than ever. The very high-availability system architecture of the Elastic Search infrastructure is a benchmark in the field, making it a major asset.
EveryParts' core functionality is its ability to search, filter and manage the parts criteria in your catalogue. Thanks to a practical and intuitive search system, you can quickly find specific parts for any type of vehicle or appliance, so customers don't have to waste time browsing. A powerful search engine also makes it easy to find the parts you need for a given model. You can also filter the catalogue by brand, type or category to find the products you need more quickly.
Supercharged natural referencing
Designed to improve your shop's SEO, we have studied the best practices that are sustainable and safe for your shop in order to build results pages that are good for your catalogue...
Finally, you can have content pages by type of equipment/apparatus or vehicle, make, model/reference, year or version according to the nomenclature of your field of activity. All the metadata fields can be customised or dynamically generated according to a template that complies with SEO best practice.
There's no need to multiply the number of pages, insert duplicates or even force the construction of specific pages for each piece of equipment. The aim is to create a logical and healthy tree structure for Google while maximising your ranking.
