Helios Auto — your car,
illuminated.
A specialist e-commerce store for premium ambient lighting and audio upgrades. Built for enthusiasts who know exactly which Mercedes model they drive and exactly what they want for it.
The brief.
Helios Auto sells premium ambient lighting and audio systems for high-end cars — 3D and 4D rotary speakers, LED logo projectors, anti-theft lighting, full interior ambient kits. The kind of hardware that attracts buyers who do their research before they even open a browser tab.
The client was selling through Instagram DMs and a basic static page. It worked — until it didn't. As the catalogue grew past 60 SKUs across dozens of vehicle-specific configurations, the manual approach broke down. Customers were ordering parts for the wrong model. Support emails piled up. The opportunity cost of missing a proper store was obvious.
"We know our products better than anyone. We needed a store that knew them too — and could tell each customer exactly which part fits their car."
— Helios Auto, project kickoffConstraints
- Vehicle compatibility is everything — a Burmester speaker kit for a W213 E-Class will not fit a W203. The store had to prevent wrong-model purchases.
- Dark, premium feel — the brand lives in dark interiors with red and amber lighting. The site had to match that world, not look like a generic WooCommerce theme.
- Bulgarian market, EU reach — primary language Bulgarian, with pricing in lev and euro.
- Fast to update — new product drops and seasonal promotions needed to go live without developer involvement.
Our approach.
We chose WooCommerce — not because it was the default, but because the vehicle-compatibility requirement mapped well onto WooCommerce product attributes. We extended the product schema with a custom "Compatible vehicles" attribute taxonomy, so every SKU is tagged by make, model series, and year range.
The front end is a fully custom theme — no off-the-shelf components. The dark base, red accents, and category imagery were all designed from scratch to match the brand's existing photography and Instagram presence. We treated the product category pages like editorial pages, not filter lists.
Vehicle filter first
The most important UX decision was putting the vehicle selector at the top of every category page. Customers pick make → series → model year before browsing. The catalogue then filters to only compatible products. Wrong-model orders dropped to near zero in the first month after launch.
What we built.
Vehicle-compatible product filter
Customers select their car model upfront. The catalogue filters to only compatible SKUs — no more wrong-model orders.
Custom dark-theme storefront
Fully custom WooCommerce theme with dark base, red accent system, and editorial category pages built from the brand's photography.
Bulgarian checkout flow
Native BG and EU pricing, Speedy and Econt courier integration, and bank-transfer payment option alongside card.
Promotion engine
Category banners, homepage feature slots, and timed promotional pricing — all editable without touching code.
Model-specific landing pages
Programmatically generated pages for popular vehicle series (W213, W222, X5) targeting model-specific search queries.
Installation guide library
Per-product PDF guides and video embeds attached to each listing — reducing post-sale support volume significantly.
Results, three months in.
The store launched in spring 2025. The immediate priority was eliminating wrong-model purchases and converting the Instagram audience into paying customers through the new storefront.
The installation guide library turned out to be a bigger win than expected — customers who found the guides on Google were converting at nearly twice the rate of direct visitors, because they arrived with intent already confirmed.
The stack.
Proven tools, configured precisely for the job.
- WordPress + WooCommerce with extended product schema — custom vehicle compatibility taxonomy, rich attribute filters
- Custom theme — no starter template; built from design tokens matched to the brand's visual system
- Speedy + Econt courier API integration for Bulgarian domestic shipping with live rate calculation
- Stripe for card payments plus a Bulgarian bank-transfer flow for B2B orders
- Cloudflare for CDN and image optimisation — product photography is large and frequent