People use UB Instant Layered Navigation for all sorts of things. Here’s the story of progressiveparts.com, a car parts store that bridges the gap between part suppliers, garages and end consumers themselves. And their story is truly inspiring.
We sat down for a Q&A interview with Ben Thomas, Progressive Parts’ founder about why they chose Magento 2, how it all came together and the process of building their store with UB Instant Layered Navigation extension.
Filter by Parts with UB Instant Layered Navigation
Ubertheme: Tell us a bit about your Magento beginnings. How did you get into Magento?
Ben: My name is Ben Thomas, I’m Owner/Director of Progressive Parts Ltd. (progressiveparts.com) and Rooks & Kings Ltd. (rooksandkings.co.uk)
Actually this is one of the first major projects I’ve undertaken in Magento 2. Until now I’ve been working predominantly on other projects with only limited experience using Magento 1.9.
Ubertheme: What got you started with Magento 2, and why did you choose it for your project?
Ben: We wanted a robust ecommerce solution and when we formed the business beginning of 2016 we carefully considered whether to start the project using Magento 1.9 or Magento 2 (with the limited in-house skill-set available to us). With the intention of future proofing ourselves eventually decided on M2 despite the inherent issues we had starting out with minimal support and extensions available to us.
Filter by Brands with UB Instant Layered Navigation
Ubertheme: What was the brief for your Magento 2 project?
Ben: Progressive Parts has always been designed to try bridge the gap between part suppliers, garages and end consumers themselves. We set out to create a car parts store specialising in performance parts and we needed a platform that would allow us to easily grow and manage a catalog spanning hundreds of thousands of products without breaking a sweat. The configurability of M2 products has been extremely important with the detailed information and fitting requirements accompanying each part we stock, crucial to our customer buying the correct part of their vehicle.
My Magento 2 store profile:
- Product catalog: 12,000+
- Categories: 350
- Attributes:
- Vehicle Make -- 70+ (multi-select)
- Vehicle Model -- 2,500+ (multi-select)
- Vehicle Variant -- 12,000+ (multi-select)
Ubertheme: How UB Instant Layered Navigation extension helped manage your layered navigation functionality?
Ben: With such a huge catalog, being able to filter the product catalog efficiently is invaluable to us. Not only that but the product attributes associated with these parts caters for every car manufacturer and model in the world!
A vast majority of our customers are only interested in their vehicle, or at least another they’re interested in. This means we needed an efficient method beyond Magento’s default functionality for users to narrow their search.
We reviewed MANY “advanced layered navigation” modules before coming across Ubertheme’s Instant Layered Navigation, originally we were simply looking for a module to compliment our custom “part finder” module. But when we came across Ubertheme’s Instant Layered Navigation we were amazed at how fast the module behaved in our test & production environments and the filtering between thousands of products constructed from the pre-built index was effortless, taking a lot of strain away from the server!
Filter by Vehicle with UB Instant Layered Navigation
Ubertheme: What are the benefits of using UB Instant Layered Navigation extension?
Ben:
- Easy setup
- Outstanding support, all our technical questions were addressed same day.
- Instant filtering, reduced server load.
- Speed
- Brilliant for SEO.
Ubertheme: Any friendly tips for people who’re new to the world of Magento 2?
Ben: We didn’t have a dedicated Magento developer when we started out so the learning curve has been steep. Our advice is to do your research finding reputable and skilled companies before choosing any extensions to work with. In case that wasn’t, we consider Ubertheme to be one of these…
Flexible side-bar filter with infinite loading capability
We’re truly inspired by how Ben turned UB Instant Layered Navigation into a beautiful and truly instant navigation base for his Magento 2 store — and we hope you’ve been inspired, too. If you’ve been thinking about doing something similar, let the success of Progressiveparts.com be the inspiration you need to give it a shot!
What do you think about Progressive Parts story? Let us know in the comments below, we’d love to hear from you.
