A portal for automated car selling

The used car market is diversified and relies on local dealers, dealers gathered around one producer, and portals gathering adverts from both groups as well as individual sellers. The main challenge in this area is to be present with the offer in a variety of places, everywhere potential clients might be looking for a car. Presenting your offer on your website solely might not be enough to attract customers, but posting it in a variety of portals and managing these ads later on is a time-consuming task. This is mainly because every portal has different guidelines and fields to fill out. 

As a response to the above challenges, for our client, we’ve built a portal that automates used car selling. The ads can be posted automatically to a variety of portals with high accuracy – and speed. This way, more human resources are left to serve clients that are seriously interested in the offer – answering their specific questions and showing them cars in reality.

Behind what may seem to be just an app to sell cars, there actually is a whole system providing integration with external portals in different countries and a panel devoted to administrators to manage the ads, with no technical skills required. Along with multiple language versions, it all makes the project intricate and challenging.

We’ve developed from scratch an international application that helps to sell (mainly) after leasing cars. Apart from the standard functionalities such as adding car details and uploading photos, there is an option to fill them automatically in from external sources, as well as automatically post ads on outside portals. As there are sometimes as many as 130 fields to fill out on every portal, the platform saves car dealers a lot of time. 

Writing the app from scratch allowed for easier maintenance, which is finally consistent for every country it operates in, and for taking responsibility for communication with external service providers, in all countries served.

We’ve written integrations with the 3 most popular portals in each country, give or take, such as Mobile.de in Germany or Allegro in Poland. Although there are plenty of different fields to fill out depending on the particular platform, we’ve managed to achieve 99% accuracy in automated car ad posting. 

The system has an independent admin panel in which non-technical employees can manage parameter mapping. Before the new platform was introduced, developers were needed every time an error occurred, e.g. violet cars were published as blue. Currently, managers can fix the problem on their own. 

With our platform, car dealers have more time to serve their clients instead of posting ads on a variety of portals. Currently, the system handles up to 500 car adverts daily, in three languages, but we’re getting ready for higher numbers.