Leaseauto.nl: guiding consumers through the world of private leasing
Private car leasing has been an emerging trend over the last couple of years and a growing number of manufacturers and third-party providers are offering private car lease services.
For consumers, this results in an enormous amount of work while comparing prices and terms before being able to pick the right private lease car and contract.
One-stop shop
The founders of Leaseauto.nl, with extensive experience in the automotive industry, noticed that there was no existing service for comparing private lease car offerings that put the users first.
Leaseauto.nl, therefore, wants to provide a one-stop shop in the field of private car leasing with the latest prices, information, and a full range of lease car providers.
The challenge
Leaseauto.nl wanted to validate their concept as quickly as possible and asked Luminis to help them turn their concept into a usable Minimal Viable Product (MVP).
Comparing lease cars, however, is a complex challenge. Cars are a complex product if you think about the fact that a single car can have multiple models all with their own set of options and accessories. Next to that, every lease car provider has their definitions of mileage, contract time, and additional prices for specific options or packages so we needed to try and get a unified data model for all this information and be able to search, compare and filter through this information.
A team consisting of a frontend engineer, a backend engineer, a search engineer, a tester, and a product owner took an agile approach to deliver the MVP. In small iterations, together with the founders of leaseauto.nl, they developed parts of the comparison website. All with the following goals in mind: it needs to be fast, fully responsive, and able to quickly scale in case of onboarding new lease car providers and customers.
The result
A fully responsive comparison website was developed based on React, a JavaScript library for building rich user interfaces.
React allowed the team to create UI components that could be reused across different sections of the comparison website. The website itself is leveraging several (REST) APIs for displaying car or contract information, search and filtering results, and processing offerings. New features and fixes for the website can be developed and deployed at a high pace by leveraging Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery pipelines.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) was selected as the preferred cloud provider. Within the AWS cloud, the team leveraged existing managed services like Amazon Elasticsearch Service, Amazon RDS, Amazon CodePipeline, and Amazon ECS. This allowed the team to get up and running quickly and let them focus on building customer value instead of managing infrastructure.
By taking the above steps we’ve ensured that future expansions can be implemented efficiently and quickly.
