First Team Auto Group Website Design & Development

First Team Automotive has been a family owned and operated car dealership since 1946. Today, 3rd generation Owner and Chief Operating Officer, Ashton Lewis, Jr. leads the company that includes First Team Toyota, First Team Honda, First Team Subaru, First Team Kia, and First Team Hampton Chevrolet.

Challenge

First Team set out to redesign their dealership group website (firstteamauto.com) to showcase inventory from all of their franchise dealerships. They also wanted the ability to display inventory from partner dealerships. Creating a website for the First Team Auto dealership group required developing a system that could import and manage dealer inventory from multiple inventory applications. They turned to Marathon because of the company’s depth of experience within the automotive industry and their vast knowledge of automotive systems.

Solution

Marathon designed and developed a new website for firstteamauto.com using the Umbraco content management system (CMS) platform as the backend to provide non-technical content editors a user-friendly and flexible editing experience. The goal of the new design was to highlight First Team’s vast online inventory and guide users through a vehicle search using multiple journeys. Marathon developed the vehicle listing and search interface using HTML5, CSS, and Vue.js, and it is powered by a custom-built faceted search built on Umbraco’s Examine search library. The solution also supplements vehicle information with the latest details and images from the ChromeData APIs, as well as an integration with First Team’s customer relationship management system (CRM) so that client inquiries are received directly from the website.

Part of the development effort included designing and developing a partner inventory system to integrate with third-party inventory APIs, including, but not limited to, vAuto, HomeNet, Dealer.com, and AutoUpLink Tech, to pull vehicle inventory from partnering dealers. The inventory is populated into SQL Azure via a Hangfire-controlled queue and, upon successful import, is then added to the Umbraco Examine search index, publishing it to the live website.