New project: Zuffenhunt - Porsche parts aggregator

Hey all, I wanted to share a project that I’ve been working on for a while. The idea is simple: we’re all constantly searching for parts for our cars. And nothing exists today that aggregates all the options for us into one place. So I created Zuffenhunt . Think of it like Kayak for Porsche Parts. Zuffenhausen + parts hunting.... you get it. This is very much a test and a project. I’ve got a handful of vendors that I’ve chosen based on just where I typically look at for parts. I’m still trying to see if this is something that would be useful for folks. So please, GIVE ME YOUR FEEDBACK. I want to know what works, what doesn’t. Is this actually useful to you? Important: I’m not pretending to be a vendor or trying to sell these parts. I’ve applied for a few affiliate programs with some of these vendors and I’m hoping that can be enough to just pay for hosting fees. But if the project turns out not to work, I have no problem shutting it down and moving on. So please send me your feedback. This is very much a labor of love and something that I wish existed. https://zuffenhunt.com/

Interesting concept. Unfortunately, it doesn't work well. A Google search is much better. When I put in 996 102 117 57, your site only returns an ebay listing. If I manually go to the other websites that were listed as searched on your page, e.g. FCP Euro for example, I found the part there even though your engine did not return any hits for it.

Great concept, I did a test also.

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This is great feedback, keep it coming! Sounds like I've got some backend logic to tweak. I'm continuing to work on the way it processes searches and my goal is to get it much better to the current execution. Question for you, do you typically search by item number i.e. "996.102....." or by keyword? In fact, you've given me a great idea for a feature improvement, which is the site should do an automatic lookup by code and provide listings for that code even if they're not part of the listing title. Thanks!

Hey @yvvvz I churned through a few things and added the functionality you were talking about. Should work better now. Give it a shot when you get a chance and please let me know what you think. Thanks!

Hey Flattestsix, I gave it a quick shot. I entered my year (1999) and my zipcode (98198) and typed in 'headlight'. It gave me options for that year and associated tools and an aftermarket option for a pair, but it also gave other year options up to '04. However, when I clicked on only sourcing 'aftermarket', it show none. There was a pair on there when I selected all options. I'm assuming as this builds, you may be tying in other vendors too? What a job this must be to tie all this in and make a search engine work for it. Great idea and I hope it gains momentum and works like a charm! I'll stay tuned.

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Great catch! Thanks for this, I�ll get that bit fixed up that�s an easy one. I�m also still catching filtering bugs on the search engine but my goal is to get it to be stellar and I think it�s doable so please keep giving me feedback guys. one other question is, would you use something like this or does it feel off or unnecessary?

I’ll use it for sure!

Searched for lower control arm got about 25 ebay listings and 2 from Suncoast... not great

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I always search for 996123456 or 996.123.456 or 996 123 456 or "996 123 456" in google

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Good to know, thanks Justin. The OEM code lookup should be working a lot better now. Give it a shot and let me know what you think

I’ve been testing your parts search tool and I’ve got to say, it’s a really interesting project. I don’t know much about programming myself (I’ve only played with a little Python), but I’m curious how you got it to this point. It’s impressive that it already pulls in results from eBay and some of the Porsche dealer sites. I noticed Pelican, FCP, ECS, etc. don’t show up much, so I’m guessing those sites are harder to work with or block scraping. Either way, what you’ve built so far is pretty cool. One thought I had: this could eventually make a great mobile app. A lot of Porsche guys check prices while they’re in the garage or out looking at parts, so having something quick on a phone might be really handy. Not saying you should do that — just something that crossed my mind as I was using it. Would love to hear more about how you built it and what your plans are for it.

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Hey Blitz, thanks so much for trying it out. The results from Pelican and ECS might not be coming back as much just because there's not as many items for a particular search results compared to the volume coming back from ebay. But if you do a search for something like "brake" a lot more results from FCP and the like will come back as those guys don't really sell used parts. The backend has definitely been a bit of an evolution and look some time to get right. And as you can tell, I'm still very much improving it. It's mostly python with some SQLlite. But the key was not to store any of the actual products for legal reasons. I've definitely been thinking about the app idea as a quick follow-up. The biggest question there is, how would an app improve over just the mobile version of the site that already's up and running. One thought for me was, could you take a photo of a part and search that way. Having the app recognize automatically what you're looking for. The other things I'm thinking of adding soon are a "garage" feature where you can save your car so that you don't need to enter that info over and over again, as well as favorites that you might not be ready to buy just yet but want to keep track of. A future item might be entering an item that you want to buy, and having the site send you an email when one becomes available. I'd love to hear any and all feedback you guys have on all this!

Great project idea. Well done! Could you consider pulling pricing from https://www.autohauspartsdelivered.com/ ? They are the online retailer for Porsche of Peoria and their pricing and shipping always seems to be some of the best for OEM items.

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Oh good one! Let me dig through this one and add it in. Seems pretty straightforward. Any other vendors you all feel are missing or are unnecessary?

PartsGeek.com eEuroParts.com RockAuto.com (seriously) Byers Porsche Parts cars245.com (I think they are in Latvia but sometimes their OEM pricing is really cheap) Amazon (yes, seriously) These are all vendors that I�ve used over the past 10+ years. I only buy Porsche or OEM-equivalent parts�.no URO or off brand junk.

Thanks for all of the feedback everyone! I just pushed a bunch of updates that fix and improve things. Searches now have a unique URL so you can copy and paste it or share it Increased fonts on desktop/mobile Improved Filter UI on mobile @theblitz thanks for catching the issue with the search results. That's been fixed. Now getting 62 results for a 996 lower control arm across most of the vendors Simplified Filters @islaTurbine thanks for that list of vendors! I'll work on getting those integrated.

With the features your talking about adding tells me 2 things (1) you must have some awesome coding chops (2) this could turn into an invaluable tool, gotta keep this thread going and get more eyes on it

Thanks so much for the kind words @theblitz I really hope this can become something valuable for our community. Right now my biggest objective is getting the quality of the search results to a much better state. It�s coming along!

Hey guys, bunch of backend improvements pushed out this morning to clean up search results and pull better data. Check it out and please send me feedback!

https://www.rosepassion.com/ has worked for me in the past. If you are looking exclusively for US businesses, nevermind. But if open to international sellers, they are worth looking into. I'm in Germany but have a US address, so I can go both ways (for this only!)

Good job. In the future, when you make it stable, add one more option for Europe. In Europe we avoid to buy from the US due to import taxes. Moreover, a lot of sites offer a lot of alternatives. Some are: https://www.autodoc.co.uk/ https://design91.uk/ https://rrr.lt/en/cars-list/porsche https://www.9xxteile.com https://partworks.de/Home https://www.eurospares.co.uk/Porsche https://classicparts.eu/porsche-classic_1 https://www.heritagepartscentre.com/eu/porsche

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Interesting. Might be worth considering a �Region� selector for Europe vs US when searching. I didn�t think to consider how many folks might be international.

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Best site to have a US address: https://www.myus.com/

Great idea for the aggregator @FlattestSix ! I tried searching for "oil pressure sensor" and didn't get any new listings that I expected from FCP Euro and Pelican Parts: https://zuffenhunt.com/?q=oil+pressu...2006&zip=90210 Also, I'm now in a Cayman (987.1) but still lurking here ... eager to see this expanded to other models

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Thanks for the catch! I'll dig into why that's not coming back from those vendors. Also, cayman/boxter support is coming likely this week! Stay tuned sir!

Good news folks. Some solid performance and listing logic improvements on the backend. I've also been able to add ECS Tuning as a vendor and get accepted to their affiliate program. More updates and improvements coming!

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Thanks again for finding this bug, turns out the system needed to understand that oil pressure sensor and sender were the same item. This has been fixed!

Understandably, sometimes it takes quite a while to develop and display the list of search results. You might want to incorporate some sort of visual indicator that lets the user know the search is ongoing and things have not locked up. A spinning wheel, a "Search in progress, this could take up to 20 seconds", etc. Many people new to your site might give up and leave too early.

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Yeah, make it a spinning Turbo Twist!

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HAHA! I might just try it if I can do it tastefully! But better loading screen is definitely a great suggestion guys. Please keep them coming and let me know what's breaking. Or what you want it to do better or different. Separately, Boxter/Cayman support is now live ! Thanks for the poke @dxrohanx

Fast turnaround, thanks @FlattestSix ! One more from me: it seems like the sort function "Relevance" works on "Source Type" but I might be mistaken. Is there a way to add sort by "vendor"?

Can you tell what I've been shopping for? @FlattestSix help me with this one please -- searching for "oil pressure switch": https://zuffenhunt.com/?q=oil+pressu...2006&zip=90210 No results from Pelican Parts but I know they carry it: https://www.pelicanparts.com/search/...ressure+switch Their site has been a little big laggy lately so I'm wondering if you got a timeout. If that is the case, maybe an indicator that a particular site didn't return any results/timed out/etc. Thanks!

@dxrohanx organize by vendor is actually pretty easy to implement. Will add it in. The Relevance sort works a by giving every title a custom score. Some matches score higher than others depending on the original search term. It�s honestly the piece that I�ve spent tweaking (and continue to tweak) the most. It�s still not where I want it to be, but you guys testing this thing is really helping a ton to find things that aren�t working well! Great find on the Pelican search bug, thank you! That�ll get fixed this weekend with a new update. Has anyone been able to actually find this useful? Have you found a product you were looking for? Has anyone actually bought anything as a result?

Awesome @FlattestSix ! In my opinion, it is very useful. I normally have different tabs open searching for parts so I think once my confidence increases in the functionality, it will be my first stop.

Hey @dxrohanx - Sort by Vendor is now live and working my friend. Thanks for all the great feedback. Don't forget you can also use the filters on the left to narrow down the vendors you want to see. The Oil Pressure Switch issue you found with Pelican is also fixed! Thanks for flagging that. The issue was the back-end was getting tripped up on the fact that in this case a 986 part is backwards compatible to your 987. I was waiting for these 996/997 and 986/997 issues to pop up somewhere haha! Please keep testing and sending me issues and feature requests guys! I've got a decent backlog of things I want to add but solid search performance is goal #1 as I really want this to be a solid tool we can all use to find parts for ourselves.

Hey all, quick update. Made some massive improvements to search results last night. The amount of results should be significantly larger now. And while that's a good sign that the search engine is working better, I'm curious if that's actually more useful to all of you. Would love to hear some thoughts!

I have a cart full of exhaust mounting parts on design911 that I�ve been using the parts numbers from to run tests on your search engine a couple of times over the course of the last few days. The results have been mixed at best, the most results on any of the parts I have had returned was 2 choices, and curiously design911 have not been included in any of my searches. However if I go to the individual sites that are supposed to be searched but didn�t yield a hit by zuffenhunt, and I plug the part number in I get the result I�m looking. I love the concept and would and will be a user and I encourage you to continue the project but it�s not quite there yet.

I think it's getting better and better I just did a search for suspension bolts and got served up a couple supliers I never knew about a site called "weekend Rides" had just what I was looking for at a great price and I've never heard of them before

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This is great feedback! Keep this coming you guys. Please don�t worry about insulting me or the work. I want to hear if it�s not working or if you hate something. I�ve been in this space for a long time and have a thick skin. The goal is to make a great product not to stroke my ego. So fire away the raw feedback folks! Going to dig into this!

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Thanks Blitz. The search results will slowly improve and the engine will get smarter at finding the right results. What�s most helpful is all the searches you guys are doing and the feedback you guys are leaving for me here!

@drptphntr could you let me know the parts you were searching for?

I noticed yesterday that searching using an OEM�s internal part number doesn�t seem to work. For example, the OEM Rein engine mounts are AVE0382P but that won�t bring up any results. I�m not sure how you�d thread that needle though.

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Hmm that's an interesting one. I'll take a look at it. If there's a central lookup area the way there is with standard OEM part numbers (996.123.345....) then it's not hard to build that in. The question becomes how often you all are using internal oem part numbers to search.

Hey guys, it's been pretty clear from the feedback that the quality and volume of search results is the most important thing before adding any other features. So I've spent the last few days really working on improving both. The good news is that I've been able to tweak the backend to fetch a ton more results for each search and to make the engine smarter about what you're actually looking for. Some of the issues at the moment are that sites like ECS don't provide a direct product catalog and are not crawlable directly so you won't see their prices listed. However, you should be seeing a lot more vendor results now and better matching. Please send me issues and search terms that are giving you bad results and any other feedback you have!

Vendor: "Autohaus Parts Delivered" price as "See site" really isn't useful IMO. I know I can deselect the vendor in the left nav.

Perhaps if there was an option to exclude items without a price?

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Sorry, I didn’t see this until now. I just ran a sampling of the same parts and with your new changes I am getting many more vendors included in the results (most don’t include price though), so whatever you did is working! Great work, this is going to save us all time and money, appreciate the effort!

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Yep, this is a really good point and it�s something I�ve been wrestling with. The question of, do I include vendors for which there�s not a price available just to provide the information about the product in one place. It sounds like that�s not giving enough real value. At least for you. So perhaps for the time being I might remove these vendors. I am working on adding a few salvage yards as I really believe that those can be a great place for finding a used part every once in a while.

I would allow user to filter the "see site" entries. There may be good deals there perhaps, like sites that can't advertised below MSRP or some such?

Two updates from last night: - I ended up swapping out Autohaus Parts Delivered for AutohausAZ. The catalogs are similar and the AutohausAZ allows me to pull prices and images. - I was also finally able to pull in Hollander Parts results which is a salvage network. This works towards my vision for the site as really being a best of both worlds in terms of new and used parts directory all in one place. Things I'm thinking about : - One thing I'm noticing is that as the amount of search results grows (which is obviously awesome) it also makes it harder to scan through all of them and find perhaps the thing you're actually looking for. So one thing I'm thinking about is creating a two tab system at the top that easily allows you to flip between new/oem parts and used parts. This way, if you know you're looking for a new starter, you don't even need to look through all of the used results. However, the downside there would be that you wouldn't be able to easily compare the same part inline new vs used. - Favorites. This is something that I'm looking to implement really soon as it will allow you to just favorite a few items as you scan the results and then come back to them later. This could be something that you use to build yourself a shopping list for the future, or simply as a personal filter. - Adding International support. A few folks have mentioned this, and it's something I'd like to add, but I'm not quite sure how many folks here are outside the US. As always, let me know what you want to see! And thank you guys so much for all the feedback. https://zuffenhunt.com

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Might be able to group/ thread (think MS Outlook conversations) items when same part number/ price or some such combination

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Haha! Your read my mind! I�ve been working on this in the background on and off. It�s a longer term effort that I also think will massively improve things!

Favorites are now live! Hey guys, big update over the last few days. You can now favorite items that you're thinking of buying, or even make yourself a custom shopping list. That means that now, you can search for a part, favorite a few results, then search for a different part, and favorite a few others -- creating a custom list of items you're thinking of buying: Check it out and let me know what you think! https://zuffenhunt.com/

Our first sale & Big Mobile UI Update! Hey all, the last month of working on Zuffenhunt has been pretty crazy. And two days ago, the site hit a major milestone: someone actually bought something through an affiliate link (I have no idea who as all of that traffic is private and will continue to be). As I mentioned when I started, the goal with this project isn't any kind of get rich quick scheme but it would be great to be able to simply pay for hosting and server fee's. The other thing is only a few of the vendors listed actually support affiliate linking (Pelican, ECS and Ebay). That being said, the site has had an average 37% click through rate to vendors, which is pretty awesome considering the relatively low amount of traffic. So if you do see something you're looking for through the site and you buy it, please know that I greatly appreciate the support. In other news, I worked on a pretty major facelift to the mobile UI as I'm guessing many of you might be looking for parts while you're in the garage or on the go. So now the search results load a grid view and render details much friendlier for small screens: As always, please send me issues or feedback that you might have! https://zuffenhunt.com/

Well done. If you can get rich and we can find better prices for parts, this should be absolutely fine. I would ask you to add a cookie to save my preferences for the car. So each time I visit the site, my car and area is preselected and don't have to fill it again

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Thanks for the kind words. And that's actually a pretty simple update (and a great idea). This should be updated on the site in the next few hours.

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Add https://rosepassion.com and https://fvd.net too. Should you run out of things to improve or extend on this awesome app, then consider either mirroring the fan or its turning direction as currently the fan blades' sweep and its turning direction make it look it's turning backwards 😄

Haha good stuff @hardtailer thanks! Will definitely add those two to the list. I'm currently looking into adding international support and what that would take. Great point about the fan haha. It's on the list

EU Vendors are Live!! Hey all, psyched to announce that EU Vendors are up and running! We’re starting with just 3 for now (Rosepassion, Design911 and Ebay) but over the next week or so I’ll be pulling in a bunch of others that folks have recommended. Please drop in your favorites in the comments that you’d like to see. I’ll do my best! Thanks to @hardtailer , @isalos for getting me started! https://zuffenhunt.com

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That you implemented quickly! 2 of the 3 mentioned are UK based and therefore not EU. Since Brexit it is no longer worthwhile to have parts shipped to mainland Europe due to import taxes etc. In that regard it would be great if one could choose the different national sites for autodoc, ebay and amazon.

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I agree. Good job. Check autodoc and the German ones, ending at .de

Thanks @isalos @hardtailer can you guys give me some EU specific vendors that you guys would like to see and i will look into them?

Not specific for EU but based in France (rose passion) and Germany (the others) respectively https://rosepassion.com https://fvd.net https://partworks.de/Home https://www.autodoc.de/ https://www.ebay.de/

Hey all, I was out sick for a few days, but back to it now. Some updates on the site: - International Support is Growing, I'm adding more vendors that supply to all of the EU, rather than just the UK. Thanks for the feedback on this. - Updated UI. I've updated the look and feel of both the desktop and mobile site to make it easier to find what you're looking for. - Improved search engine and favorites. The results should be more accurate now and don't forget that you can mix and match categories of products by adding them to your favorites list. If you're thinking of doing say an interior swap, you can use favorites to make your shopping cart: https://zuffenhunt.com

Cars245.com are really good also, i use them a lot in NZ and their shipping rates are very good.

Hi - for me I'd like to search for Europe and US at the same time. Based in Australia I search both anyhow...

Thanks for the Update! It took some trials to get the filter settings out of the way. I believe a refresh button visible at the bottom would make this more intuitive . Also with this search, only the first two results open in a new tab,.on my mobile phone (android): https://zuffenhunt.com/?q=steering+r...1999&zip=90210 The others yield an empty page. The first two results worked as expected. I appreciate your efforts and hope this feedback is helpful.

Great points @SimJen and @justinbAUS - noted. I'll work on both of those. @hardtailer I really appreciate you testing that out and finding those bugs! Will dig into what's happening there. I've been re-working the way the search engine works and should have a fresh new build today or tomorrow! As always, thank you guys for trying this crazy project!

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Check out the update! I added a few of the ones you mentioned. More are on the way! https://zuffenhunt.com

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Hey yvvvz, wanted to make sure I got back to this issue you found in the beginning. This has been all resolved and running smoothly. Check it out when you get a chance!

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Cars245 is finally added

Hey all, new poll added to help get ideas for what features we should add next. Would love your thoughts!

Hey all, I've been making a bunch of updates under the hood and have been adding some more US/EU vendors. I'd love to hear if you guys are using the site and how good/bad the results are compared to Google or other ways you're searching! Thanks!

I did a LOT of part shopping recently for my 968 CS and honestly I didn�t find much success with your search engine. I ended up finding the majority of my parts through German Auto Supply, Delaware Porsche Parts, Pelican, and RockAuto.

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This is actually really useful for me to know. Because I want to make it better. Do you mind letting me know what didn�t work? Or was it simply that those vendors weren�t on the platform? Thanks!

I think part of it was that your site�s results were mostly populated by eBay hits and not by vendors that I was looking for so I quickly moved on to my usual methods. Another thing I�ve noticed, which may or may not affect your site, is that most dealer-operated sites will not provide valid search results if the part number has any spaces. Lastly, many of the parts that I use are OE-equivalent but I dig up the part manufacturers� internal part numbers instead of using Porsche�s. I�m not sure if any of that is helpful to your work.

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Thanks for this IslaTurbine, it�s actually really helpful. I think perhaps one thing to take away from this is possibly promoting more vendors and forcing eBay listings down in the result set. Another thing I need to do is attempt to reach out to a few dealers to see if we can get them to let us scrape their sites. Like Delaware Porsche. A lot of folks have asked for this.