Tokyo Exporters

The challenge

Tokyo Exporters sells Japanese commercial vehicles to overseas buyers, and the entire proposition rests on one interaction: can a buyer in another country find the exact truck they need? Stock is not a catalogue of fixed products — every unit is one-of-one, with its own make, body type, condition and price. WordPress out of the box has no idea what a truck is, and no way to let someone filter by three unrelated dimensions at once. Buyers also arrive in two languages, so whatever got built had to survive translation.

The approach

I modelled the stock properly instead of forcing it into posts: a Trucks custom post type, a dedicated Brand taxonomy alongside categories for body type, and ACF fields for the per-unit details that vary — price being the one buyers filter on hardest. The search itself became its own plugin rather than theme code, so it survives redesigns: category and brand resolve through taxonomy queries while price runs as a numeric meta query against the ACF field, all combined into one request behind a single search bar. Sitting the whole thing in a plugin also meant the site could run bilingually through TranslatePress without the filters breaking in Japanese.

What changed

• 01Stock modelled as a Trucks custom post type with a dedicated Brand taxonomy
• 02Three-dimensional filtering — category, brand and price range — resolved in one query
• 03Price filtering driven by ACF numeric fields rather than rigid product options
• 04Search packaged as a standalone plugin, so it outlives any theme change
• 05Bilingual English and Japanese storefront with filters intact in both
• 06Built in partnership with fellow developer Alawi