Designed, Launched and Managed a C2C Car Marketplace

My personal experience with purchasing a used car, and the transparency and trust issues I encountered in the traditional buying and selling process, inspired me to create a solution. I built a cross-functional team and built and managed the product for a year.

I bought my first pre-owned car, a Skoda Superb, in 2019. I was thrilled with the purchase, but my excitement was short-lived. Within two to three weeks, the car began experiencing mechanical issues. Additionally, my friends informed me that I had paid above the market price. This disappointing experience made me feel cheated, and I couldn't help but wonder how many others have felt the same after buying a pre-owned car.

I posted on Facebook groups to find people with similar experiences. After speaking to a group of people I could categorise them into the following:

1. People looking to buy a pre-owned car

2. People who already bought a pre-owned car

3. People who are selling their cars

After analyzing all the information I gathered from my research group, I started brainstorming and sketching solutions on paper. I was sure that my product had to do the following things:

1. Connect buyers and sellers directly to restore trust and transparency in the process.

2. Charge a fixed service fee and be upfront, informing customers about our charges and other costs if the transaction is successful.

3. Ensure that the vehicle price is a fair market price based on demand, condition, and history by comparing it with third-party tools and existing market prices.

4. Share a detailed inspection report of the vehicle so that the buyer can be aware of the vehicle's condition.

5. Allow and guide negotiation between the buyer and seller to finalize a price.

6. Ensure the protection of the buyer and seller and avoid transactions involving accidental, flooded, or faulty vehicles through the platform.

7. Facilitate documentation and paperwork.

Keeping these pointers in mind, I sketched a user flow diagram and discussed it with my colleagues. Here is the finalised user flow diagram.

Once this flow was finalised, I created the:

1. Brand Identity and Collaterals

2. Product Designs in Figma

3. Social Media Posts, Banners and Ads

4. Marketing Assets

5. Blogs and Articles

People browse for cars in various ways. Some may be looking for a specific model, while others might be open to suggestions but have preferences regarding fuel type, body type, transmission, price, and so on. To cater to both types of searches, we have a search bar and categories in the top navigation. The secondary navigation hides when the user scrolls up and appears when the user scrolls down.

YESScore was an annotation to measure the quality of the vehicle, it is a score out of 5. The closer the score is to 5 the better the quality of the vehicle.

People can browse cars without signing in but have to sign in to submit an offer or book a test drive.

The inspection report on the car details page informed the buyers about the condition of the vehicle. We provided scores for each sections of the car - exterior, interior, engine, tyres and road test. These score were also out of 5 and were scored by the car inspector during the inspection of the vehicle. We used colours to indicate the condition of each part and also added photos of the faulty items.

To ensure that our prices were accurate we used third party tools like https://orangebookvalue.com/ and also compared our prices with other online and offline marketplaces. We had a price comparison widget on the car details page to show the difference.

It took us 2 months to build the platform using technologies like React and Node.js. The product was mobile responsive since most of our traffic would be coming from social media ads.

We operated this product from May 2020 → June 2021 and we were able to serve 200+ people to buy and sell cars through our platform. People highly appreciated our services.

To manage supply-demand and optimise our product and processes we tracked the following metrics: