A 500,000-part online store for a 70-year-old equipment dealer.
We rebuilt Scholten Equipment's parts store from the ground up: instant search across 500K+ parts and exploded-view diagrams, click-to-buy from the drawing, live two-store inventory, and real carrier shipping.
Last updated
This video explains the scholtenparts.com website and gives a full walkthrough: instant part search powered by Typesense, 500,000+ parts organized by equipment and category, and an exploded-view diagram where clicking a numbered pin adds the exact part to the cart.
Transcript: website walkthrough
This video explains the scholtenparts.com website and walks through it screen by screen. It has music only, no narration; this transcript gives the on-screen text and what each scene shows. 0:00 Opening: the Scholten's Equipment, Inc. logo. On-screen text: "Built by DoodleWeb". 0:06 The homepage scrolls past Shop by Equipment Category and Frequently Used Parts. On-screen text: "Built in WordPress, WooCommerce, WP Engine and Typesense". 0:12 Brand logos for Kubota, CLAAS and JCB, the three main brands the store carries. 0:18 The hero search. On-screen text: "Search by part number, equipment model, or keyword." Typing "Rope" brings up matching Kubota parts instantly. 0:24 On-screen text: "Powered by Typesense". Results update as you type, with model and series shown under each part. 0:30 A montage of category, listing and diagram pages from across the store. 0:36 On-screen text: "500,000+ parts, organized by equipment and category." The category grid shows belts, blades, engine components, filters, tires, fluids, electrical and more. 0:42 On-screen text: "Thousands of diagrams across Kubota". An exploded-view diagram appears with the parts table underneath. 0:48 On-screen text: "Click the part on the diagram". A numbered pin highlights its matching row in the parts table. 0:54 On-screen text: "Click the part on the diagram, add it to cart. Done." The part goes into the cart, showing stock status and price. 1:00 The shopping cart opens with the part, quantity, delivery note, total and Check out button, plus accepted payment methods. 1:06 Closing: the DoodleWeb logo. On-screen text: "Book a call... Need a parts store?"
Short answer
What did DoodleWeb deliver for Scholten Equipment?
Scholten Equipment, a family-owned farm equipment dealer in Lynden and Burlington, Washington, hired DoodleWeb to replace phone-and-paper parts ordering with an online store. DoodleWeb built scholtenparts.com on WooCommerce and WP Engine with instant search, click-to-buy exploded-view diagrams, live two-store inventory and real carrier shipping. The store holds 500K+ parts and diagrams, serves 546K diagram images from a CDN, and added 700+ CLAAS machines automatically.
Scholten Equipment is a family-owned dealer in Lynden and Burlington, Washington, selling and servicing farm equipment (Kubota, CLAAS and more). Their parts business ran on phone calls and paper catalogues. We delivered scholtenparts.com: a WooCommerce store on WP Engine with over 500,000 parts and exploded-view diagrams, a search engine that answers as you type, interactive diagrams where customers click a numbered pin to add the exact part, inventory synced from the dealer's HBS business system, live UPS and USPS rates, Stripe payments, local pickup at either store, and SEO so the catalogue is discoverable. We also built the data pipeline that keeps the catalogue growing, including an automated import of the entire CLAAS parts catalogue.
Key facts
- Client: Scholten Equipment
- Location: Lynden and Burlington, Washington
- Platform: WordPress / WooCommerce on WP Engine
- Catalogue size: 500,000+ parts and diagrams
- Launch year: 2026
- Services: Data engineering, WooCommerce build, search, diagram viewer, ERP inventory sync, shipping and payments, SEO, catalogue pipeline
- Client
- Scholten Equipment
- Industry
- Agricultural equipment dealer
- Platform
- WordPress / WooCommerce on WP Engine
- Timeline
- 2025–2026
- Products
- 500K+
- Diagram images
- 546K
- CLAAS machines
- 700+
- Locations
- 2
Last updated: August 2026 · Source: DoodleWeb, Columbia Tower, 701 5th Ave 42nd Floor, Seattle WA 98104 · info@doodleweb.io · (425) 359-0168
Where they started.
- Printed and PDF catalogues. Customers had to call the counter just to identify a part.
- Duplicated diagrams and a 20 GB database. Each diagram was stored once per machine, which crashed search and threw gateway errors.
- No online inventory. Two stores shared stock, but customers could not see what was on the shelf.
- Manual shipping quotes. Every shipping price was worked out by hand before an order could go out.
What we built.
We rebuilt the catalogue on a lean model, one diagram shared by many models, and put Typesense instant search over roughly 700K documents. Interactive exploded-view diagrams use numbered pins that open the part and add it to the cart, and a part-to-diagram relation shows every drawing a part appears on, with images served from S3 and CloudFront. HBS inventory sync shows combined stock for both stores, while UPS and USPS Ground Advantage live rates, Stripe checkout and local pickup with clear pickup-confirmation wording handle fulfilment. Location pages, transactional email through SendGrid and a launch SEO layer completed the build.
Where it landed.
The store launched with the full catalogue searchable. Customers find a part by number, model or keyword in milliseconds and buy it straight from the drawing, and the team receives orders with the right pickup store or carrier label. The catalogue keeps growing automatically: the CLAAS line was added after launch without any manual data entry.
The work behind the launch.
Each engagement covers strategy, design, build, and post-launch care — orchestrated by a single senior team.
Barriers we had to overcome.
A concise look at the constraints that shaped every decision in the build.
A catalogue that was eleven times too big
Every exploded-view diagram had been stored once per machine it appeared on, so the database had grown to 20 GB and the search index kept running out of memory. We rebuilt the catalogue around a single copy of each diagram, keyed by its content, and linked machines to it instead. The index dropped to about 700K documents and search went from failing to instant.
Hard limits on the managed host
The host blocks any database query over 16 KB and times out long requests at the gateway, which broke bulk operations on a catalogue this size. We rewrote every bulk job to run in small batches with automatic retry and resume, so a timeout costs seconds instead of restarting a multi-hour job.
Prices that showed as 'on request'
Multiple caching layers (object cache, page cache, CDN) occasionally served stale pages where real prices showed as 'Price on request'. We built an audit endpoint that compares what the site is serving against the database and purges only what is stale, so the catalogue stays fresh without flushing everything.
A manufacturer portal with no export
CLAAS publishes parts only through a dealer portal with no download or feed. We built an automated catalogue pipeline that imports each machine's diagrams, part lists and pin positions, checkpoints its progress, and publishes machine by machine with prices and search refreshed automatically. Over 700 CLAAS machines across 11 categories are now live, and new ones are added the same way.
Sessions and uploads that would not stay up
Portal sessions expired every few hours and the host returned gateway errors on the largest machines. Instead of babysitting, we made every step resumable: imports pick up from the last machine, publishes retry with back-off, and a monitor logs every start, stop and recovery so nothing is silently lost.
What we built.
The pieces that shaped the final build — each tied back to a real business outcome.
Instant part and model search
A Typesense index of roughly 700K parts, diagrams and models with typo tolerance and filters. Customers find a part by number, model or description in milliseconds instead of flipping through PDF catalogues.
Clickable exploded-view diagrams
546K diagram images served from a CDN, each with pinned hotspots. Click a callout on the drawing and the matching part is highlighted and added to the cart; every part page also links back to every diagram it appears in.
One live inventory across two stores
A scheduled sync with the dealer's HBS/Netview system keeps stock for the Lynden and Burlington stores current on every product, including superseded part numbers, so customers see what is actually on the shelf.
Live carrier rates, pickup and payments
UPS and USPS Ground Advantage rates quoted live at checkout, local pickup at either store, Stripe payments, and transactional email through SendGrid.
Automated CLAAS catalogue import
An import pipeline that brings in new CLAAS machines, drawings and parts automatically, de-duplicates against what is already live, refreshes prices and the search index, and labels every model with the manufacturer's own catalogue codes so dealers recognise them instantly.
SEO and go-live hardening
Indexing turned on correctly at launch, structured data and sitemaps for 500K+ products, a go-live checklist, and legal and footer pages cleaned up for a dealer that had never sold online.
What changed.
What changed for the team and their audience after launch — measured in real behavior, not vanity metrics.
- Customers self-serve part identification
- Orders arrive with the correct pickup store or carrier
- Both stores' stock visible online
- Catalogue grew by 700+ CLAAS machines after launch with no data entry
- Site stays healthy at 500K+ products
- Emails reach the inbox from the store's own domain
Technology used for the Scholten Equipment project
DoodleWeb delivered this engagement on WordPress / WooCommerce on WP Engine over 2025–2026. The published project record includes the following platforms, tools, and delivery disciplines.
- WordPress + WooCommerce on WP Engine
- Typesense search
- OpenSeadragon diagram viewer with custom pin overlay
- AWS S3 + CloudFront for 600K images
- HBS inventory sync
- UPS and USPS APIs, Stripe
- SendGrid
- Node + Python catalogue pipeline
- Custom WordPress mu-plugins for maintenance and imports
Custom-designed in Figma, built on WooCommerce.
We designed every screen of scholtenparts.com from scratch in Figma: the search-first homepage, category browsing, diagram listings, filters, cart and account flows. We then implemented the designs as a custom WordPress and WooCommerce theme, hosted on WP Engine.
I honestly couldn't believe all of this was possible. Our entire parts catalogue, every diagram, every part number, is now online and searchable, and customers can buy straight from the drawing. How professionally and how fast DoodleWeb launched this store is mind-blowing.
Numbers we are proud of.
Specific, measurable, and pulled from production (not assumptions).
| Measure | Value |
|---|---|
| Parts and diagrams online | 500K+ |
| Diagram images on the CDN | 546K |
| CLAAS machines added automatically | 700+ |
| Search index size | ~700K documents |
| Stores on one live inventory | 2 |
| Database reduction after de-duplication | 20 GB → under 2 GB |
| Carriers quoting live | 2 (UPS, USPS) |
Frequently asked questions about the Scholten Equipment project
- Can WooCommerce handle 500,000 products?
- Yes, with the right data model. We de-duplicated diagrams so one drawing is shared across models, moved search to Typesense, served images from S3 and CloudFront, and chunked bulk operations to stay inside WP Engine query limits. The store runs healthily at 500K+ products.
- How does the diagram click-to-buy work?
- Exploded-view diagrams are displayed in an OpenSeadragon viewer with a custom overlay of numbered pins. Clicking a pin opens the matching part and lets the customer add it to the cart directly from the drawing.
- How is inventory kept current across two stores?
- Inventory is synced from the dealer's HBS business system, and the store shows combined stock for the Lynden and Burlington locations.
- How do you get live UPS and USPS rates?
- Checkout calls the UPS and USPS APIs, including USPS Ground Advantage, to quote real carrier rates. Customers can also choose local pickup at either store.
- How did you import a manufacturer catalogue with no export?
- The CLAAS catalogue lives in a session-based web app with no export. We built an automated catalogue pipeline that imports each machine's diagrams, part lists and pin positions, and publishes it through WooCommerce with prices and search refreshed automatically. Over 700 CLAAS machines are now live.
- How do new CLAAS machines get added?
- Through the automated catalogue pipeline. New machines are imported, checked against what is already live, published with prices, and indexed for search without manual data entry. Model buttons carry the manufacturer's catalogue codes so dealers can match them to their own paperwork.
- What keeps search fast at this scale?
- Search runs on Typesense over roughly 700K lean documents rather than querying the WordPress database, so results return as customers type.
- Can other dealers reuse this?
- The approach — lean catalogue model, instant search, pinned diagrams, ERP inventory sync and an automated import pipeline — applies to other equipment and parts dealers. We scope each dealer's systems and catalogue sources first.
- How long did the build take?
- The engagement ran across 2025–2026, covering discovery and data audit, the catalogue engineering and store build, launch, and the ongoing catalogue pipeline.