Development of a catalog of investment coins

GoldTech Market is a company specializing in the sale of investment gold and silver coins. The company works with both private investors and corporate clients, offering a wide range of products to preserve capital and long-term investments.

The main objective of the project was to create a modern online catalog that automatically keeps prices and assortment up-to-date without the daily manual work of employees.

The project was created entirely from scratch.

Before the start of development, the company did not have a full-fledged online catalog, so all processes were accompanied by manual information processing.

The main objectives of the project:

• to develop a modern catalog of investment coins;
• implement a personal user account;
• automate the import of goods;
• opt out of manual price updates;
• create a convenient administrative dashboard;
• to ensure the possibility of further scaling of the project.

In two months, a full-fledged catalog management system based on 1C-Bitrix was developed, including:

• product catalog;
• coin cards;
• Product categories;
• search;
• filtering;
• user registration;
• authorization;
• password recovery;
• personal account;
• order history;
• feedback forms;
• the application system.

The catalog includes more than 100 products, divided into 6 categories, with support for working with several currencies at once and shipments to different countries.

Automation of catalog content has become one of the key tasks of the project.

Instead of manually adding products, a system for automatic parsing of data from a third-party resource was implemented.

Imported:

• Product names;
• Descriptions;
• specifications;
• images;
• availability;
• prices.

This made it possible to almost completely eliminate manual work on filling the catalog and significantly accelerate the updating of the assortment.

The cost of investment coins directly depends on the value of precious metals and the exchange rate.

To solve this problem, our own automatic cost calculation system has been developed.

It includes:

• getting the current exchange rate through the API of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation;
• daily data updates;
• automatic recalculation of the cost of goods;
• support for multiple currencies;
• the ability to set an individual markup through the administrative panel.

Thanks to this, employees stopped recalculating the cost of goods manually every day, and the likelihood of errors almost disappeared.

A convenient administrative management system has been prepared for the company’s employees.

You can use it to:

• manage a catalog;
• control the import of goods;
• change coefficients and margins;
• manage users;
• view applications;
• edit the site content.

Most operations are performed without the involvement of developers.

The use of 1C-Bitrix was a mandatory requirement of the customer.

Additionally, the platform was well suited for the project due to the ready-made capabilities for working with catalogs, users and further development of the Internet project.

The most time-consuming part of the project turned out to be the automatic parsing of a third-party site’s catalog.

It was necessary to receive large amounts of information correctly, converting them into the 1C-Bitrix catalog structure without data loss and with the possibility of regular automatic updates.

Special attention was paid to image processing, product characteristics, and maintaining data integrity during subsequent synchronizations.

After the launch, the company received a fully automated online catalog.

As a result, it succeeded:

• automate price updates;
• to abandon the daily manual recalculation of the cost;
• significantly speed up catalog updates;
• reduce the number of errors when publishing data;
• implement a convenient personal account for clients;
• create a platform ready for further development.