Parts Sourcing Platform Rebuild

Overview

A parts sourcing platform used by members of a large automotive cooperative across Australia and New Zealand. Workshops use it to search for parts across a network of preferred suppliers, request quotes, and manage orders from a single interface - instead of calling around or checking multiple catalogues.

I came onto the project initially to support the existing v1 application, built on Laravel and Vue. A year of hands-on support and bug fixing gave me deep familiarity with the codebase and its pain points, so when the decision was made to rebuild from scratch, I was well placed to help shape what v2 would look like.

The Problem

The v1 platform had serious performance issues. Searching for parts, loading quotes, navigating between views - these core workflows could take minutes rather than seconds. For members who depend on speed to keep their workshop running, that was a dealbreaker. Some had already started moving to competing platforms.

Infrastructure costs were also a concern. The AWS-hosted database instance alone was costing thousands per month, hard to justify given the experience it was delivering.

Technical Approach

The rebuild moved the entire stack from Laravel/Vue on AWS to a React frontend with a .NET backend on Azure. I was the primary contributor to the frontend across mobile and desktop, and played a key role in architecture decisions around the cloud migration.

Performance-First Frontend

The biggest user-facing wins came from rethinking how the app fetched and managed data. Instead of waiting for full page loads, we implemented aggressive prefetching - anticipating what a user would need next and loading it in the background before they navigated.

React Query became central to the data layer. We used its mutation and cache invalidation patterns to keep the UI responsive during write operations, updating the interface optimistically while syncing with the server in the background. For search-heavy flows, results appeared near-instantly even on slower connections.

Cloud Migration

Moving from AWS to Azure meant rearchitecting the deployment pipeline, database layer, and hosting infrastructure. The key outcome was reducing database costs from thousands per month down to hundreds - over 90% reduction - without sacrificing performance.

Mobile & Desktop

The v1 app was desktop-first, with mobile as an afterthought. For v2 we designed both experiences in parallel, making sure the workflows that matter most in a workshop - quick part searches, quote comparisons, order tracking - worked well on a phone screen.

Challenges

Earning trust through support. The year I spent on v1 wasn’t just maintenance - it was relationship building. Understanding the client’s frustrations firsthand meant I could advocate for the right technical decisions during the rebuild. That trust directly led to ongoing engagement beyond the initial project scope.

Balancing speed and correctness. Optimistic updates make the UI feel fast, but they add complexity around error handling and rollback. We spent time building robust patterns for handling mutation failures gracefully, so the UI never showed stale or incorrect data for more than a brief moment.

Results

• Load times for key workflows reduced from minutes to seconds
• Infrastructure costs reduced by over 90%, from thousands to hundreds per month
• Fully responsive experience across mobile and desktop
• Client relationship strengthened, leading to ongoing engagement
• Members who had been considering alternative platforms retained on the new version