Click-to-Keys: A Car Marketplace That Converts
At a glance
CLIENT
Regional automotive marketplace connecting dealers and consumers (multi-country EU footprint)
SERVICE
- Platform re-architecture, Marketplace workflows, Payments & finance integrations, Data & fraud analytics, Devops enablement
INDUSTRY
- Mobility / eCommerce
Industry: Mobility / eCommerce
The marketplace had traction but not throughput. Listing a car required manual data entry across dealer CRMs, finance checks ran offline, and buyers dropped off between “view” and “apply.” The legacy monolith made every new lender, payment gateway, or loyalty offer a months-long project. Leadership wanted one enterprise software backbone for end-to-end online buying: verified listings, real-time finance offers, secured payments, delivery scheduling, and post-sale support—without pausing dealer operations.
LeanCoded rebuilt the core as API-first services with a unified vehicle data model (specs, media, provenance, pricing), instant credit pre-checks, and checkout that bundles deposit, finance, and delivery. Dealers sync inventory via connectors or SFTP; buyers see on-the-spot finance ranges and reserve a car with one flow. We instrumented every step—search, view, apply, reserve—so product teams could ship improvements weekly using cloud devops pipelines.
From Classifieds to a Transactional Engine
Where it broke.
Inventory was inconsistent: duplicate VINs, missing trims, stale photos. Median page load sat at 3.7s on mobile; checkout required three separate redirects (lender, KYC, payment). Finance approvals took 1–3 business days, and deposit refunds were manual. Fraud reviews were batch-based, so bad listings lingered. Partners (insurers, transporters) integrated via brittle CSV drops, and each new lender meant code changes and weekend freezes. Dealers complained about long onboarding (weeks) and no analytics on listing quality.
What we changed.
We designed a web application development services layer of packaged capabilities—Listing, Search, Pricing, Finance, Payments, KYC, Logistics—exposed through versioned APIs. VIN decoding, taxonomy, and media normalization happen on ingest; dedupe runs via a similarity model. Buyers get instant pre-qualification bands via lender APIs; deposits settle through a payment gateway platform with escrow logic; transport booking sits in the same checkout. Dealers onboard in <48 hours using self-serve connectors and validation wizards. A/B flags, real-time dashboards, and devops release trains turn weekly bets into measurable lifts.
What Moved the Needle (measurable results)
- +22% uplift in “view → apply” after reducing mobile LCP to 1.9s (p95) and merging redirects into a single, embedded flow.
- 72% of finance decisions returned <90 seconds via lender API orchestration; deposit-to-delivery lead time down 31%.
- Fraud/quality pipeline cuts unverified listings by 38%; false-positive rate <2.5% through rules + signals (age, price deltas, image hash).
- Dealer onboarding time fell from 2–3 weeks to 1–2 days; bulk inventory sync errors down 67% via schema validation.
- Search relevance boosted CTR +14% using popularity signals and vector search on embeddings for queries like “family SUV under €15k.”
- 12-month availability: 99.95%; incident MTTR <18 min with autoscaling and circuit breakers.
- Operating cost per transaction reduced 17% by moving image processing, VIN decoding, and pricing to shared services.
Unified vehicle model
Real-time finance
One-flow checkout
Dealer self-serve
Signals, not hunches
Security & trust
Ops at scale
Why It Matters to the Business
The platform stopped being a classifieds site and started closing transactions. Buyers know financing in minutes, not days; dealers get inventory online fast with quality controls; and product can experiment without begging for backend rewrites. The marketplace now competes on speed, trust, and UX—not on ad spend alone.
- Faster finance decisions
- Higher view→apply conversion
- Dealer onboarding in days
- Fraud down, trust up
- One-flow checkout
- 99.95% availability
What’s Next: From Cars to a Mobility Ecosystem
Next waves focus on lifetime value: subscription add-ons, protection plans, and trade-in flows with automated appraisal. We’ll open selected capabilities to partners (pricing, KYC, logistics) as managed APIs and add machine learning consulting services for dynamic pricing and churn risk. Devops release trains continue with canary rollouts, synthetic monitoring, and error budgets; quarterly game-days keep teams response-ready. Data contracts and lineage will support external audits and faster onboarding of new lenders and transport partners.