Automotive commerce platform

The challenge

The client had a dealer network, a commercial agreement with the brands and a launch date already committed to those partners. What it did not have was a platform, an engineering team, or the appetite to build one before the market window closed. Buying an off-the-shelf marketplace product would have meant bending the dealer commercial model around someone else's licence terms.

The requirement was unusually clear about the operating model. The client wanted the platform built, run, monitored and improved by one accountable party, with a single agreement covering development and operations. It was not staffing an internal team and did not intend to.

What we did

We scoped hard for the launch, and said no to a lot. Version one carried vehicle listings with dealer-level inventory, search and filtering, lead capture routed to the correct dealer, a dealer console for stock and lead handling, and an administration layer for the network operator. Financing, trade-in valuation and the mobile applications were explicitly deferred to later releases with the client's agreement.

The build ran as one team with a fixed weekly demo. Infrastructure was defined in code from the first week, so the environment that carried the launch was the same one we had been deploying to since week two. Automated tests, monitoring, alerting and an on-call rota were in place before go-live rather than added after the first incident.

Dealers were onboarded in waves after launch, each with data loaded, users trained and a short supported period before the next wave. That kept the support load predictable and let us fix the awkward parts of the onboarding flow while the numbers were still small.

The outcome

The platform reached production eight weeks after kick-off and carried the committed launch. Twenty-eight dealer locations are live on it, each managing its own inventory and leads inside the network operator's rules, with listings and the buyer experience available in Arabic and English.

We continue to run it. That means monitoring, incident response, releases, capacity and cost management under an agreed SLA, alongside a product backlog reviewed with the client each month. Financing enquiries and richer dealer analytics shipped in later releases, funded from the same managed arrangement rather than a new project.

The client's own commercial team operates the network from the administration console without needing engineering involvement for routine changes, which was one of the explicit goals of the design.

Results

Stack we use