SwissMcars Case Study · Premium Swiss Multilingual Dealer

01 · The context

A premium dealer, a demanding bilingual market

SwissMcars operates in the Swiss premium automotive market: high-end used vehicles, consignment sales, paint protection and detailing, demanding clientele looking for vehicle quality and purchase experience equally. The client base is also international: foreign buyers visiting Switzerland to purchase premium vehicles. Serving both French AND English speakers seamlessly is non-negotiable.

The previous site was a basic, monolingual, static showcase. To manage the catalog, the team had to go through an external freelance developer, a dependency that slowed every vehicle addition and blocked publication of SEO-driven blog articles.

02 · The problem

3 friction points capping digital growth

A monolingual site in an international market

Impossible to seriously capture international English-speaking clientele with a French-only site. Google Translate doesn't cut it: a premium buyer paying 80,000 CHF wants a site that speaks their language.

Permanent technical dependency

Every vehicle addition, every price change, every blog article went through a freelance. Days-to-weeks delays, accumulating invoices, team frustration.

No SEO content strategy

Without internal CMS, no active blog. Without active blog, no visibility on long-tail queries like "premium used car Switzerland". The competitor publishing 2 articles per month took all the spotlight.

03 · The solution

A bilingual Next.js site + complete back-office

We delivered a modern Next.js site, bilingual FR/EN from go-live, with a custom back-office that covers 100% of business needs: vehicle catalog management with high-resolution photos, detailed technical sheets, editorial blog management, and a CRM that tracks clients, issues quotes and invoices and drives leasing, consignment sales and accounting.

The SwissMcars team now publishes their vehicles and articles directly, in both languages, without any dev intervention from us. That's the essence of Pilotage: a site you no longer have to endure.

Native FR/EN bilingual site

Dynamic vehicle catalog

Every service laid out: PPF, consignment sales, stock, detailing

Rich vehicle pages (HD photos, specs)

Complete custom back-office

Integrated blog CMS (direct publishing)

Custom CRM: client tracking, quotes and invoices

Leasing, consignment sales and accounting driven from one place

Multilingual SEO (Google Switzerland & international)

Mobile Lighthouse 95+ performance

Next.jsReactTypeScriptTailwind CSS

04 · The process

4 weeks, 4 phases, no scope creep

Week 1

Scoping & bilingual structure

Bilingual cannot be bolted on afterwards: a vehicle page written in French and then translated ends up with specs that drift between languages, and an English-speaking buyer reading a wrong figure.

The existing site audited before any structural decision
Vehicle data modelled in French and English from the outset
Site structure laid out target market by target market

ErgebnisOne vehicle dataset for two languages: no more specs drifting between the French and the English.

Week 2

Mockups & design system

The same headline never runs the same length in French and in English. A layout validated in one language breaks in the other once the real content lands: clipped buttons, overflowing vehicle labels.

Desktop and mobile mockups built in both languages at once
A typographic grid calibrated to absorb the length gaps
One design system for both languages, from button to vehicle page

ErgebnisWhat is signed off in the mockup holds in both languages, real content included: nothing to redo.

Week 3

Frontend + back-office dev

With no back-office, every vehicle added, every price corrected and every photo swapped goes back through a developer. The showroom moves on, the online catalog lags behind, and a planned blog post waits twice: once per language.

A secure back-office: vehicles added or edited in a few clicks
Vehicle photos managed from the back-office, with no developer
Blog published in both languages without going through a dev

ErgebnisThe online catalog keeps up with the showroom day to day, and the blog ships in both languages at once.

Week 4

Content migration & go-live

A launch rarely fails on the code: it fails on a catalog migrated halfway, on pages that were never translated, and on a team discovering on launch day a back-office nobody ever walked them through.

The existing catalog migrated, vehicle page by vehicle page
Missing content translated before the production deploy, not after
Two hours of training and onboarding videos for the team

ErgebnisOn launch day the catalog is complete in both languages and the team knows how to run it.

05 · The results

Stock managed autonomously, active blog, zero support

100%

Management autonomy

The SwissMcars team publishes vehicles and articles directly, in 2 languages. Zero external dev intervention on routine operations.

FR + EN

Active multilingual SEO

Each language is indexed on the right Google (Google.ch and international). English-speaking clientele is now seriously targeted, no longer best-effort.

Support tickets since go-live

Stable architecture, solid training, video documentation. The team is autonomous from day 1: that's the goal of a successful delivery.

Lighthouse

Mobile perf score 95+

Pre-generated pages for instant display, optimised images, deferred loading: the site renders in under 2 seconds on Swiss 4G.

View the live site

The site has been running in production for months, without a single intervention on our side.

SwissMcars

Google review ★★★★★: “Efficient service.”

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