Used car parts ordering site, live 37 days after I joined

The client runs a network of car recycling centers, which take old cars apart and resell the parts. It wanted repairers to be able to search and order those parts online, starting as a trial.

The stock lives in the client's own system. Every day it puts a file of all available parts on a server, and the site has to follow it.

I joined the project as a developer on 30 October 2023. The client wanted to show the site to repairers on 28 and 29 November, then go live right after.

I had to build the search, the cart and the orders, import the client's file every day, and send each order to the right center.

The first version, in November 2023. Sign-up, login, search, cart, an account page, and a layout that works on mobile.

The stock import. With another developer, I built the import. Every night, an automation tool (Make) picks up the client's file, cuts it into packs of 500 lines and sends them to the site. A part that was already ordered is kept as a record, never deleted.

The orders. When a repairer confirms a cart, each center gets an email with the parts ordered from it. The repairer then gets a confirmation with the same table.

The search. By manufacturer reference or, when the file has none, by brand, model and type of part.

The 2024 changes. Cards instead of a wide results table, the end date of each part's exclusivity period, a contact form, account requests approved by an admin, and a stock export to a spreadsheet.

The start of large files went missing at import, because of a wrong split. I fixed it the same day.

In April 2024, after the account requests went live, nobody could log in. The new "active" field was empty for every existing user. I told the client the mistake was mine, and offered to mark all existing users as active.

In September 2025, the stock stopped updating. I scheduled the import Monday to Friday at 11:30 pm and ran it again by hand. The client confirmed the same day that the stock was up to date.

Each request was a ticket, and the bigger ones went through a quote first. When a request was unclear, I asked before building. Every change went through a test version, then to production after the client approved.

Not everything went well. We had underestimated the import, so we delivered late: the first version was ready to test on 20 November 2023. In December, the client asked us to test more thoroughly, because bugs had been reported to them.

In production on 6 December 2023, 37 days after my first day, for about 52 hours of work.

The stock updates every weeknight from the client's file.

Changes until September 2025, about 98 hours in total.