Building the Booking.com for mobile heating and cooling

Renting temporary heating and cooling solutions for commercial and residential projects used to be an analog process that lacked transparency into equipment types, pricing, and availability. With the expertise of Agilo, Viessmann built the marketplace, mobileheating.de, to digitalize the user journey and reduce the rental booking process from months to minutes.

Simplified bookings at a global scale

Mobile heating and cooling units are usually used for temporary periods of time in various commercial and residential use cases. Renting these units has traditionally been an opaque process that could take weeks or months. It required significant manual effort from both customers and suppliers, including detailed research and numerous calls and emails to establish requirements, coordinate booking times, create quotes, and finalize agreements.

Viessmann set out to become the global rental platform for mobile heating and cooling by creating a more transparent ecosystem for both customers and suppliers. With their platform, they wanted to create a simple renting journey that could be completed as easily as online hotel bookings.

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Our vision is to create the Booking.com for mobile heating and cooling solutions. We plan to transform the industry by providing a seamless, transparent, and efficient platform that makes renting temporary heating and cooling units as simple as booking a hotel room or a car.

Jordan Lunetta

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Service Owner, Viessmann Climate Solutions

With mobileheating.de live in Germany, they aim to first win the domestic market before scaling the platform globally. A journey that Medusa can seamlessly support with its built-in multi-region support.

Cutting booking time from months to minutes

The new platform simplifies the booking process for both customers and suppliers by providing instant quotes and transparent pricing in one platform. Customers reduce the time spent on researching suppliers, coordinating bookings, and comparing quotes. In the new platform, the buying journey is reduced to:

• Input customer info: Fill in address, booking dates, and optional performance needs.
• Browse and select products: Products and pricing for dates and locations in one place.
• Request and complete booking: Suppliers confirm the booking and coordinate the rental.

So far, suppliers using the platform have reduced the time spent creating quotes and gathering customer requirements by over 60%. By receiving all customer information upfront, suppliers can qualify customers and manage orders quickly. They are also marketed in a unified platform with increased customer exposure.

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With the new platform, we have transformed a process that used to take days, weeks, or even months into something that can be completed in minutes. Customers now have full transparency on pricing and availability.

Baris Buchholz

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Business Development Manager, Viessmann Climate Solutions

Medusa: the ideal scalable foundation

When defining the platform requirements, Viessmann prioritized creating a globally scalable foundation. They wanted a solution that supported native localization and could be adjusted as they expanded, avoiding the need to build multiple stores for different countries.

The team initially considered traditional SaaS platforms. While a SaaS platform would enable a quick initial build, it would limit their ability to implement specific business logic and scale effectively. Building from scratch was also considered but deemed too time-consuming.

Instead, Medusa offered the ideal middle way. The platform's core commerce functionality gave them a scaleable foundation to start from, while its flexibility and developer tooling allowed them to tailor the user experience according to their business needs. The Viessmann team pointed to three main reasons for going with Medusa:

• Multi-regional scaleability: Medusa's architecture allows for scaling and modifying the marketplace across multiple regions without needing separate backends.
• Extensibility: The team could easily build marketplace-specific functionality by extending Medusa's core data models.
• Open source: Medusa's open-source nature allowed the team to completely own the platform and any customizations they built around it.

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We looked at Commercetools, Shopify, and Magento, but none of them fulfilled our needs. Medusa stood out because it offered the flexibility to implement our own unique business logic and customize the user experience.

Jordan Lunetta

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Service owner, Viessmann

From zero to launch in 8 weeks

The initial build focused on creating the core elements of the marketplace, allowing for easy addition of future functionalities. In only one week, Agilo's team of two full-stack engineers had set up the basic marketplace architecture with Medusa. Afterward, the team added the custom functionality to fit Viessmann’s needs, such as:

• Connecting orders and products with suppliers: Linking orders and products with each supplier's store enabled a fast and scalable marketplace setup.
• Modifying the Admin: Using Admin UI routes and widgets, the team customized the product pages to reflect the suppliers' complex unit pricing.
• Creating a custom booking flow: Utilizing Medusa’s framework tooling, Agilo built a custom booking flow for suppliers to manage incoming orders.

After building the core marketplace, Agilo developed Viessmann’s specific business logic, including a custom post-order flow, and imported all supplier data to the platform. Thanks to Medusa’s flexibility, Agilo completed all necessary customizations and launched the full marketplace in eight weeks.

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Medusa's flexibility and ready-made components allowed us to focus on implementing the unique functionalities needed for the marketplace, speeding up the development process significantly.

Ante Primorac

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Technical Lead, Agilo

Creating a custom post-order flow

To enable suppliers to retain control over order fulfillment and payment, the Agilo team developed a custom post-order management flow consisting of the following steps:

• Create draft order: After a customer places an order, a draft order is generated in Medusa.
• Email notification to supplier: When the draft order is created, the supplier receives an email with the order details and options to accept or reject the order.
• Sync order status: Based on whether the order is accepted or rejected, it will be marked as completed or sent to Viessmann for review.
• Find order replacement: If the supplier rejects the order, Viessmann can connect the customer with a different supplier to fulfill it.
• Booking and fulfillment: Once the order is accepted, the supplier handles booking and fulfillment, and the information is synced with Medusa.