01 Starting point
Trade in used commercial vehicles lives off the stock. Every vehicle is a one-off with its own history, its own body and its own specification. There is no catalogue in the usual sense. Anyone who wants to be visible online has to show a stock that changes constantly.
Buyers in the truck segment check the technical detail. What matters is axle configuration, body, mileage, first registration and condition, not advertising copy. Research typically starts on a phone in the yard or on site and continues later at a desk. The same page has to serve both situations.
02 Solution
The basis is TYPO3. Vehicles are not loose content pages but structured records with their own fields for body, engine, mileage, first registration, price and images. Overview, filtering and detail page all come out of that one structure. Duplicate maintenance is ruled out from the start.
The front end is built for image load. Vehicle photos are generated server-side in several sizes and delivered according to the device. Underneath sits the usual stack: PHP 8, MariaDB, caching, operation on our own servers in Germany. TYPO3 is kept current, and security and version updates run in the same house as development.
The editorial team works directly in the back end. Vehicles can be created, changed, hidden or marked as sold without anyone touching a template. Planning, build and operation from one team, so changes to the data model do not have to be agreed across supplier boundaries.
03 Result
The stock appears online the way it is run in the business. Changes reach the site without a detour, and enquiries refer to a specific vehicle instead of a vague description. That shortens the qualifying stage in the sales conversation.
Technically the site stays open to more. Further data fields, additional output channels or connections to internal systems can be added on the same basis. At Eschen Nutzfahrzeuge that is exactly what happens, through the etruck vehicle management system.