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Project Overview
What We Built & Why
PartsForm is a B2B sourcing and procurement platform built for the industrial and automotive parts industry. The platform brings buyers, suppliers, and operations teams into a single ecosystem where parts can be discovered, compared, ordered, and managed at scale.
Buyers can search millions of SKUs using AI-assisted search, manage carts and orders, track deliveries, and submit support requests. Suppliers can upload and maintain catalogs through self-service tools, bulk imports, and FTP integrations, while administrators oversee orders, users, payments, integrations, analytics, and synchronization processes from a centralized dashboard.
The platform was designed to replace fragmented workflows that rely on spreadsheets, email chains, and disconnected supplier catalogs. The goal was to create a scalable procurement solution capable of handling large product datasets, complex supplier networks, and global sourcing operations.
Key Goals
Centralize sourcing, ordering, and catalog management.
Support millions of products without compromising search performance.
Automate supplier onboarding and catalog synchronization.
Reduce operational overhead through integrations and workflow automation.
Deliver a global-ready experience with multilingual and multi-currency support.
Industrial procurement comes with significant complexity. Suppliers provide catalog data in different formats, product information is often inconsistent, and buyers expect fast and accurate search results across massive inventories.
The biggest challenge was balancing scale and performance. The platform needed to index and search millions of records while supporting long-running catalog imports, synchronization jobs, and supplier integrations without affecting the buyer experience.
Additional challenges included maintaining data consistency across multiple data sources, supporting supplier-specific permissions, handling large file imports, and building a system capable of serving international users across multiple languages and regions.
To solve this, the architecture separates search, synchronization, and ingestion workloads from the main application, ensuring heavy background processing never impacts user-facing operations.
The platform was built with Node.js, Express, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, Redis, and Socket.IO to support high-volume procurement workflows and large-scale catalog management.
MongoDB serves as the system of record, storing products, orders, users, and operational data. Elasticsearch powers fast product discovery across millions of SKUs, while Redis improves performance through caching and inter-service communication. Real-time updates are handled through Socket.IO for notifications, support workflows, and operational events.
To maintain performance under heavy workloads, catalog synchronization and FTP processing run in dedicated PM2 workers, allowing imports and background jobs to operate independently from the web application.
AI capabilities powered by Gemini and Groq enhance product discovery, search understanding, and data processing, while integrations such as FTP, email ingestion, and automated synchronization reduce manual operational effort.
Architecture Philosophy
The platform follows a simple principle:
MongoDB stores the truth, Elasticsearch powers discovery, and background workers handle heavy processing.
This approach allows PartsForm to continuously process large supplier catalogs while maintaining fast search performance and a responsive user experience.
