Case studiesSoundlabz: Car Audio Retail and Dealer Store
Soundlabz: Car Audio Retail and Dealer Store
A car stereo and car audio parts store running two channels from a single catalogue - retail customers buy at list price, while dealers apply, get approved, and then see the same products at wholesale trade pricing.
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1 / 6The problem
Car audio is an unusual retail category. The same catalogue serves two buyers who behave nothing alike. A retail customer arrives from search looking for one head unit or one set of speakers, compares a handful of options, and buys once. A dealer buys in volume, expects trade pricing, reorders the same parts repeatedly, and will not tolerate a checkout built for someone buying a single item.
Most storefronts pick one of those buyers and treat the other as an afterthought. Running two separate sites splits the catalogue, doubles the maintenance, and divides whatever search authority the business builds.
Soundlabz needed both channels on one platform, with pricing and access that changed based on who was logged in, without exposing wholesale rates to retail traffic.
What we built
A single storefront with two pricing layers behind it.
Retail visitors browse and buy at list price with no account required. Dealers apply through a signup flow, and once approved, the same catalogue renders at wholesale pricing with their trade terms applied. The product data has one source. Only the pricing layer and the permitted actions change with the account type.
Behind that sits an admin dashboard where the client manages the catalogue, reviews and approves dealer applications, sets pricing tiers, and tracks orders across both channels without switching tools.
Technical decisions
Firebase for authentication and data.
The access model was the hard part of this build, not the volume. Every product view had to resolve the right price for the right account type, and a dealer's trade pricing could never leak into a retail session. Firebase's authentication and security rules let that boundary live close to the data rather than being enforced by application code alone, which meant fewer places for it to go wrong.
Express and Node for the order and approval layer.
Dealer approval, tier assignment and order processing needed server-side logic that could not be trusted to the client. Keeping that in an Express service kept the rules in one place and made them straightforward to change as the client's trade terms evolved.
React for the storefront.
One component set renders both experiences. The pricing layer switches on account state instead of the site branching into two front ends, so a catalogue change ships to both audiences at once.
The result
The site went live and reached search visibility across the catalogue within three months, with new product pages entering Google's index steadily.
The dual-channel model works as intended: retail and wholesale run through one catalogue, one deployment, and one set of product data, and every page the client adds serves both audiences and builds authority for a single domain.