Sector(s)
Project Team
Avatar New York delivered the Drupal platform, custom marketplace functionality, integrations, and responsive theme in collaboration with Military Car Lot / Reach Advertising, Inc., which provided the audience knowledge and business requirements guiding the project.
Military Car Lot brings the military base “lemon lot” online, helping service members, veterans, and their families buy and sell vehicles across more than 250 U.S. military bases worldwide.
Avatar New York developed a Drupal marketplace that connects vehicle discovery, seller self-service, premium listings, messaging, and advertising in one platform. Built around the needs of a geographically dispersed community, the website helps buyers find vehicles near their base and gives sellers, dealers, and advertisers practical ways to reach that audience.
The website is maintained on Drupal 11 and was recognized as a Season 17 Web Excellence Awards winner in Website, Veteran & Service Support.
About the project
A marketplace organized around military life
Military Car Lot serves a geographically dispersed audience with a distinctly local need: finding a vehicle near the right military base. The project needed to make listings easy to create and discover, support communication between buyers and sellers, and balance free participation with paid visibility and advertising.
Location-based vehicle discovery
Buyers can browse by military base or expand their search using a ZIP code and travel radius. Search filters help visitors narrow the available vehicles, while listing pages bring photos, specifications, price, condition, location, and seller contact tools together.
VIN-assisted listing creation
A guided seller workflow uses an external vehicle-data integration to populate specifications from a VIN, reducing manual data entry. Sellers add pricing, condition, photos, and descriptions, associate listings with bases, and manage their listings as availability changes. The listing forms adapt to different vehicle categories, including cars, motorcycles, boats, and recreational vehicles.
Premium listings and Stripe payments
Free listings support participation, while premium upgrades offer sellers additional visibility. Custom payment functionality connects Stripe Checkout with the seller’s account and selected listing. A payment-completion webhook updates the listing’s premium status, connecting the purchase to its fulfillment within Drupal.
Buyer–seller communication
Custom messaging functionality connects inquiries with the relevant listing and supports replies and email notifications. Account-based contact tools and suspicious-content reporting support the marketplace’s day-to-day operation.
In-house advertising with Google AdSense fallback
Avatar extended the Advertisement project with custom display logic for homepage, search, and listing-page placements. Listing-page advertisements can be matched to the military bases associated with the vehicle, allowing campaigns to reach relevant local audiences.
Eligible in-house advertisements take priority. When no eligible ad is available for a placement, the integration can render configured Google AdSense code instead. Scheduler integration and impression and click tracking support campaign administration within Drupal. Ads are loaded asynchronously, with lightweight placeholders keeping targeting and fallback decisions separate from the cached page.
Modernization and ongoing development
The codebase includes custom migration tooling for Drupal 7 listings, listing images, user accounts, bases, countries, and regions. The site is maintained on Drupal 11 with a custom Tailwind CSS theme and dedicated modules for listings, payments, messages, accounts, reporting, and advertising.
Business outcomes and recognition
The resulting platform brings community-focused discovery, seller self-service, premium payments, and advertising together in one extensible Drupal application. Following the improvements, the client reports record premium revenue, strong growth in audience and engagement, and growing dealer participation.
Since the improvements, we've seen record premium revenue, strong growth in audience and engagement, and growing dealer participation across the marketplace.
— Randy Hildebrandt, President and Owner, Reach Advertising, Inc.
Military Car Lot was recognized as a Season 17 Web Excellence Awards winner in Website, Veteran & Service Support.
Related implementation examples: Paid premium listings and VIN-assisted vehicle listings.
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal provided a strong fit for a marketplace whose content, geography, user accounts, and business rules need to work together. Structured content and taxonomy model vehicles, military bases, countries, and regions, while Views, Search API, and Facets support discovery across those relationships.
The project also required more than standard content publishing. Drupal’s extension points allowed Avatar New York to build guided listing forms, integrate VIN data and Stripe payments, manage buyer–seller messages, and extend advertising with base-specific targeting and fallback behavior.
Building on the existing Drupal foundation also provided a migration path for legacy listings, images, users, and location data. Custom migration plugins and mappings support the transition from Drupal 7, while a custom Tailwind CSS theme provides the responsive presentation. The resulting Drupal 11 platform combines contributed projects with focused custom modules rather than placing every requirement in a separate system.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
- Search API
- Search API Solr
- Facets
- Better Exposed Filters
- Views Exposed Filters Summary
- Select 2
- Advertisement
- Scheduler
- Message
- Flag
- Email Registration
- CAPTCHA
- reCAPTCHA v3
- Mailer Plus (DSM+)
- Webform
- Paragraphs
- Entity Reference Revisions
- Field Group
- Address
- Admin Toolbar
- Masquerade
- Rabbit Hole
- Twig Tweak
- Twig Template Suggester
- Font Awesome Icons
- ShareThis
- Responsive Favicons
- Pathauto
- Token
- Redirect
- Metatag
- Schema.org Metatag
- XML sitemap
- Google Tag
- Statistics
- Redis
- Purge
- CloudFront Purger
- S3 File System
- Views Blocks with Lazy Builder
- Configuration Split
- Config Ignore
- REST UI
- Migrate Plus
- Migrate Tools
- Path redirect import
Search and discovery
Search API, Search API Solr, and Facets provide the search integration and faceted discovery framework. Better Exposed Filters, Views Exposed Filters Summary, and Select 2 improve filtering controls and selection of related content such as military bases.
Advertising and marketplace operations
Advertisement supplies the advertising framework, including advertisement content and local impression and click tracking. Scheduler supports scheduled campaign publication. Custom Military Car Lot code adds base matching, placement-specific presentation, asynchronous rendering, and Google AdSense fallback.
Message and Flag support the custom messaging and suspicious-content reporting features. Email Registration simplifies account registration, while CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA v3 support spam protection. Mailer Plus (DSM+) (formerly Drupal Symfony Mailer) provides the mail integration used by notifications. Webform supports managed forms.
Content management and presentation
Paragraphs, Entity Reference Revisions, Field Group, and Address support structured content, related data, and organized editing forms. Admin Toolbar and Masquerade assist administration and support. Rabbit Hole controls access to entity pages that do not need their own public presentation.
The responsive interface uses a custom Tailwind CSS theme, with Twig Tweak and Twig Template Suggester supporting theme integration, and Font Awesome Icons, ShareThis, and Responsive Favicons supporting interface details and sharing.
Search visibility and measurement
Pathauto, Token, Redirect, Metatag, Schema.org Metatag, and XML sitemap support readable URLs, redirects, metadata, structured data, and sitemap generation. Google Tag and Statistics support measurement and content view counts.
Infrastructure and configuration
Redis, Purge, CloudFront Purger, S3 File System, and Views Blocks with Lazy Builder provide integrations for caching, external cache invalidation, file storage, and deferred rendering. Configuration Split and Config Ignore support environment-aware configuration. REST UI assists management of REST resources used by the application.
Migration and external integrations
Migrate Plus, Migrate Tools, and Path Redirect Import support migration work alongside Drupal core migration APIs and custom source plugins. VIN data and Stripe Checkout are integrated through custom modules; Stripe payments are implemented with the Stripe PHP library rather than a contributed Drupal commerce module.
