A licence plate is no ordinary product. Every plate is unique and belongs to a registration – and the registration itself is an authority process with documents and signatures. Selling this online means connecting more than a cart and a payment.
Using Kroschke's shop as an example, we show which building blocks work together.
1. The licence plate: configure, don't select
A licence plate consists of format, district code, letters and digits, often with additions such as seasonal or electric-vehicle plates. This can't be mapped as variant products.
In the shop, customers therefore put together their plate with our product configurator configento. The configurator validates the input, shows the result and calculates the price – faulty combinations never reach the order.
2. Registration: digital, with signature
Through the integration with CarTrust, registration can be completed directly in the shop:
- digital registration without a trip to the registration office,
- qualified electronic signature, which replaces a handwritten signature,
- licence plate reservation, so the preferred plate isn't lost.
For the customer, this is one continuous checkout. Technically, several steps with external services run behind it, and they must run cleanly in sequence with clear error handling – an aborted step must not leave a half-finished order.
3. The ERP: orders without retyping
With many orders a day, manual work is not an option. Orders therefore go to SAP automatically. In the other direction, status and shipment data come back, so customers can see in the shop where their order is.
Important: the integration has to cope with outages. If the ERP is briefly unavailable, no order may be lost – it is queued and transferred later.
4. Partners: a dedicated interface
Besides end customers, sales partners order too. For them we built a dedicated REST API they can use to create and track orders – without going through the shop interface.
What we take away
Here the shop is above all a hub: between customer, configurator, authority process, ERP and partners. Success depends less on individual features than on every handover working reliably – even when one of the systems involved has a hiccup.
Do you have a product tied to an authority or specialist process? We'll gladly show you how it can be mapped in a shop.