Autocast

Autocast is a shop and a workshop at once: someone buys an amplifier, headlights or a head unit and has it fitted on the spot. None of that was visible online. Customers messaged on social media asking about price, stock and whether a fitter was free — and every one of those conversations cost the owner time.

The second problem was the catalogue. Suppliers carry several thousand items and they change constantly: prices, availability, new models. Maintaining that by hand is impossible, so any ordinary drag-and-drop store would have died in week two.

Third, people often do not know what the thing they need is called. They know the symptom: "the headlights have fogged up", "the sound went quiet", "the camera shows mush". A standard category catalogue does not answer that.

We put the shop and the workshop on one site. A part and the service that fits it sit side by side: a visitor sees the component, the price, and the option to book the installation right there. That is Autocast’s real advantage over an ordinary online shop — it just needed to be visible.

The catalogue fills itself. We built a price-list importer: the owner pastes a link to a supplier’s XML/YML feed or uploads a dealer’s Excel sheet, and the system creates or updates products, prices, availability and descriptions on its own. The catalogue currently holds 4,605 items across 89 categories, and nobody typed a single one of them.

We added a "diagnosis by symptom" section. Instead of categories, a visitor picks what is bothering them — "the headlights have fogged up inside", "the head unit freezes in winter", "oncoming drivers keep flashing me" — and gets a plain-language explanation plus a button to book exactly that job. It turns a vague problem into a specific enquiry.

For the owner we built an admin panel: orders with their statuses, product records, categories, and control over the price-list imports. All in one place, with no separate accounting software.

It is a fair question, so here is the direct answer. A shop, an admin panel and a price-list importer in three weeks — not because anyone worked nights, and not because it is a drag-and-drop template.

First, we agreed up front what the first version contains and what waits. Second, the catalogue, basket, product records and admin permissions were not written from scratch — that is our tested base, and it only had to be fitted to Autocast. Third, the routine work — boilerplate markup, tests, parsing the price lists — went to AI. The decisions about catalogue structure, how the importer behaves and how the admin panel is secured were made by a person.

Every change was reviewed before it went live. If something on the site breaks, that is our responsibility — not "the model generated it that way".

This is the part a visitor never sees, and the part that decides whether the shop survives.

The importer reads the feed or sheet, matches items against the catalogue by the supplier’s own identifier and updates only what changed. Out-of-stock items are skipped, HTML in descriptions is stripped to plain text, and images are stored as links. Instead of a week of manual work, refreshing the whole catalogue takes minutes.

Next to it sits the order log: the status of each one, what is in the basket, the buyer’s contacts. The owner can see what is happening without asking anyone.

The site is live and populated. Everything on our side is finished, including payment handling and delivery calculation — but those two pieces are not switched on yet: we are waiting on the client for access to the payment provider and their courier account.

That is why this case carries no sales-growth figures. They will exist once the shop starts taking payment online, and we will add them here rather than invent them in advance.