SOCO : a car dealer website

By WebstanZ on 25 February 2022

SOCO is a belgian company selling New and used Cars. The company was founded in the 70’s.

With more than 6.500 cars sold in 2020, the company is now considered as the leader in Wallonia. More than 100 people are operating in Brussels, Liège, Charleroi, La Louvière, Mons, Namur, Wavre. The website lists around a thousand cars of 35 different brands for all budgets (up to 30% cheaper than if bought through a dealer). It also gives private individuals the option to sell their cars there, and to find a Soco site near them.

With more than forty years of experience, this Belgian company sells more than 500 cars every month and has 30,000 customers. If you are buying or selling your car in Belgium, there is a chance it will be managed by Soco.

Soco has built an excellent reputation on the new and second-hand market, in particular on the second-hand market by guaranteeing vehicles after having reconditioned them as new. They also partnered with Auto5 to offer periodic maintenance services and repairs. The website plays a major role in the selling process. Since there are 6 points of sales across the country, the website is the only place where you can have an overview of the current offering and directly take advantage by either taking an appointment or even better, reserve the vehicle.

Visit soco.be →

Why Drupal was chosen:

Drupal was an evidence to manage this kind of eCommerce portal / Product catalogue mainly for the inherent easiness to start small while you think big. Scalability was key for them.

Secondly, dealing on a daily basis with 35 different brands with different models, versions, engine specifications, (tons of) options, kilometers,...is definitely easier when you can rely on Drupal’s taxonomy feature. The website and of course, the product catalogues are in French and Dutch.

The main requirement of the site is that it lists all the cars available for sale. It means that we need to aggregate the stocks of each point of sale and manage priorities (local shop vs eshop) to be able to generate an exhaustive and accurate list of available vehicles for sale. The stock management system is based on a custom solution developed by the client. Hopefully, the system has an API which facilitates sync operations between Drupal’s back office and their custom application.

Of course, users must be able to sort the cars using filters such as brand, price, mileage, fuel and, of course, whether they are new or used. These filters should be present on all product pages to facilitate navigation.

The homepage was designed to directly engage visitors. Above the fold, there is already a search/filter feature to allow users to launch a quick search based on their favorite brand and model. In the middle of the homepage, some reassurance arguments and then a selection of vehicles based on persona / profiles (ex: family, city, EV,...)

Once a choice has been made, the potential buyer must be able to book the car, take out an option on it, or simulate a loan for its purchase (with or without a recycling premium). Site users also have a dedicated space if they wish to put a car up for sale. They can also easily find information about the nearest sales outlet (opening hours, address, telephone number, and email address).

Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):

The main objective of the website is to facilitate the consideration of buying or selling a vehicle and provide all the necessary information and call to actions to engage with customers and prospects in an intuitive and pleasant manner. Taking into account the large number of vehicles that are being sold and the overall turnover, Soco equipped their facilities with a photo shooting booth. Thanks to this equipment, images generated to populate the product catalogue are very consistent in terms of lighting conditions, shooting angles, ….This is very important and often underestimated: the quality of the content significantly improves the quality of the overall website.

Cherry on the cake, we recently introduced a 360° viewer which increases even more the appeal of each car showcased on the website.

Data is collected and interfaced with Soco KPI’s dashboards as well as their Google analytics to monitor conversion rate and optimize the efficiency of each campaign. Needless to say our client is looking on a daily basis on the overall performance of the website. Actions are taken as soon as we identify a drop in lead generation or prebookings.

For sellers, we created a specific workflow. Basically, a second hand car can be submitted on the website but there is a kind of moderation flow. Candidates submit their information. The data is automatically transferred to a third party ticketing system (FreshDesk) and reviewed by Soco experts. If the vehicle is accepted, the negotiation happens offline, Soco refurbishes the vehicle and does photo and 360° shooting.

A car loan simulator is displayed next to each car. If a buyer is considering buying a vehicle he can directly perform a simulation and get an idea on the cost/month to acquire this particular vehicle without leaving the page.

Search Engine Optimization

We were also mandated by Soco to manage the SEO of the website with a focus on the database of available cars. We benchmarked the competition and similar websites outside Belgium to identify best practices. Based on the learning, we had to tweak some modules to make the magic happen. Our recommendation was audited and validated by independent SEO consultants.

Different Drupal modules have been installed and configured to improve SEO, including the Metatag module covering Facebook, Hreflang, Open Graph, Twitter cards, Verification, as well as Simple XML sitemap.

Our focus was also to optimize the performance of the Product catalog from a SEO perspective. For example, the content (url, breadcrumb, intro, …) is dynamically adapted to the brand and model you are searching for which is highly rated by Google. We also paid attention to speed performance thanks to Platform.sh’s solutions.

Since we took over the website in 2019, we work in close collaboration with their SEO consultants and client’s webmaster. Yes ! Only one person manages the content on the website!