01 Starting point
Brüggemann has been selling cars since 1962 and today does so at six locations between Rheine, Dortmund and Rostock. An inventory of that size is not a catalogue but a flow: vehicles arrive, move between sites and leave. At any moment the website has to show what is genuinely available — across all locations, because a customer searches for a model, not for a branch.
Editorial upkeep is out of the question at these volumes. Whatever a person types in by hand is wrong the next morning. On top of that comes a legal requirement that is easy to underestimate in the motor trade: German law requires consumption, CO₂ emission and CO₂ class figures on every advertised vehicle. Those values have to come from the source and must not get lost on the way.
02 Solution
The basis is TYPO3. Locations and brands have their own areas with their own contacts, opening hours and service content, while editorial building blocks exist only once and are placed by configuration. The permission structure reflects who may edit which area.
The core is the vehicle search. It is not an off-the-shelf extension but one built for this purpose. Vehicle data comes from the dealer system, is normalised onto a single data model and made available with images, equipment details and the mandatory consumption figures. Filtering works across brand, model, first registration, mileage, fuel type, price range and location. The filter state lives in the address bar: a result list can be linked, shared and targeted directly from a campaign.
On top of that sit the parts that make up the trade: condition types from new via pre-registered and nearly-new to used, the pricing display of list price, discount and house price, financing and leasing rates, a shortlist and a closed dealer area with auctions. It runs on PHP 8 with MariaDB on our own servers in Germany. Caching stops lists being recalculated on every request; the import job runs decoupled from it so the site serves completely even during a sync.
03 Result
The inventory is held in one place and appears on the website automatically — across all six locations. The editorial team looks after what is genuinely editorial: location information, service offers, campaigns, contact paths.
The same vehicle search now runs at several dealerships, from a three-digit commercial vehicle inventory to over two thousand cars. Every improvement — a new filter criterion, an adjustment to changed disclosure rules — benefits all installations instead of being rebuilt in each project.