Winparts

About Winparts 

Winparts has grown over the last 20 years into one of Europe’s leading online auto parts retailers thanks to their data-driven approach.

Winparts isn't a traditional online store. With over 70,000 car model variations and complex manufacturer data, product fitment and data consistency are mission-critical. 

We don’t sell T-shirts in 5 sizes and colors. A brake pad either fits your exact vehicle—or it doesn’t. That’s where our data and experience really shine.

Marcel Houtzager, CTO @ Winparts

Today, Winparts processes thousands of orders daily across Europe, with logistics now handled by its parent company AAG. This transition opened the door for a frontend modernization from SAP CC to a composable stack to match their ambitions.

The challenge: 

Over two decades of organic growth had left Winparts with a deeply entrenched legacy codebase—built in PHP, without frameworks, and difficult to scale or localize. 

This patchwork architecture and spaghetti code created several barriers:

• No multilingual support

• No pricing flexibility by region

• Poor SEO readiness and marketing performance

• Slow experimentation cycles due to rigid architecture

“The fact that we can't set a different price in another country for a single product is our biggest challenge. Products we sell in France must to be active in the Netherlands. But that product may not be available in the Netherlands in the first place. That’s what legacy code dictates.”

Marcel Houtzager, CTO @ Winparts

While SAP was already in place organizationally, the team found Spartacus lacking, which called for a decision to completely migrate from SAP CC in the next 2 years.

That’s when Winparts started searching for a more flexible, composable solution—and found Alokai.

Why Alokai?

Alokai offered Winparts a pragmatic path toward composable commerce without having to rip and replace their entire system. Its flexibility as a frontend and middleware solution was key.

“Composable commerce lets you swap components without a full replatform. That’s what sold us. We didn’t want to commit to one CMS or PSP—we needed the ability to change lanes.”

Marcel Houtzager, CTO @ Winparts

Alokai became the central frontend for all new market rollouts. The team could plug in new backends, CMSs, and services as needed—while continuing to support their legacy systems during the transition.

“It remains a big project, but at least the customer should not be affected: same exact site, layout, performance.”

Marcel Houtzager, CTO @ Winparts

The solution: 

Winparts adopted a phased rollout: one country at a time. The first Alokai-powered site launched in April 2024 as an MVP, with continuous enhancements underway.

“We still run legacy and new platforms side by side. That’s because our legacy Dutch site performs incredibly well—5.1% conversion rate. We won’t switch until the new site beats that, but we’re confident that it will.”

Marcel Houtzager, CTO @ Winparts

Alokai’s data orchestration layer connects legacy and new systems, synchronizing data across over 400 tables. From stock and pricing to order manipulation and shipping, the new architecture overlays legacy functionality while gradually introducing scalable improvements.

“The Alokai implementation itself was a breeze. The real complexity was maintaining our legacy systems during the transition—especially with conflicting data definitions.”

Marcel Houtzager, CTO @ Winparts

The results:

• Mobile-first UX: With 75% of Winparts traffic on mobile, Alokai’s SPA approach made a major difference, replacing full page reloads with fast, fluid browsing.

“The responsive patterns have improved a lot! 75% of our customers use mobile and while the legacy site does support that, it was an afterthought. Alokai is an SPA while legacy all pages are completely reloaded.”

Marcel Houtzager, CTO @ Winparts

• Composable flexibility: The middleware integrates backend systems, CMS, analytics, PSPs, and more without any disruption on the customer-facing end.

“A monolith vendor would wish us luck and walk away. Alokai’s team jumped in, rolled up their sleeves, and solved problems with us.”

Marcel Houtzager, CTO @ Winparts

• Performance that scales: Country-specific configs and multistore logic enable localized merchandising and pricing.“

The flexibility of modules and middleware definitely is key to growth. Yet having a config per domain name enables us to set basic parameters differently for France than for Ireland. Alokai’s multistore solution makes that possible.”

Marcel Houtzager, CTO @ Winparts

Future outlook:  

With 6 stores live across both Alokai (France & Belgium) and legacy architectures, Winparts is now investing in next-generation search and filtering features to further enhance frontend performance. 

As the company continues modernizing and moving away from legacy dependencies, Alokai remains its frontend engine for growth.

“Alokai gives us the flexibility to grow per market, per sales channel, per user. It’s the only way we can scale across Europe while keeping the customer experience intact.”

Marcel Houtzager, CTO @ Winparts