BCA Marketplace
Selling Experience.
Reimagining how vendors manage and sell stock — a self-serve digital experience for one of Europe's largest used-car marketplaces.
Context.
Why this project mattered, who it served, and what it had to do.
A holistic, scalable, self-serve selling experience.
BCA's vendors needed to manage their own inventory and sell vehicles with ease — achieving the best possible sale result on every transaction. The pandemic accelerated the need to operate digitally, and the team had to deliver a permanent online vendor experience to serve a marketplace facilitating over 1.5 million vehicle sales a year.
I led the initiative as Director of UX and Product Design, working closely with the Product Director to align senior stakeholders, define the roadmap, embed user research, staff the team, and ensure the product met rapidly changing strategic needs.
- Strategy & vision
- Stakeholder alignment
- Workshop facilitation
- Design direction
- Team leadership
The Challenge.
A vendor experience built for a pre-digital world.
BCA is Europe's leading end-to-end digital B2B used-car marketplace, supported by in-house fulfilment and logistics. As BCA grew its digital channels, online self-serve capabilities became essential — but while heavy investment had gone into Buyer experience, little had been done for Vendors.
Six fundamental problems stood between vendors and a great selling experience:
- Inventory and sales couldn't be completed online end-to-end.
- Most pre-sale, sale and post-sale processes were manual.
- Vendors used different processes to enter stock for sale.
- Most steps required admin and sales staff intervention.
- Slow manual processes delayed time-to-sale with buyers.
- New branding was missing from every part of the journey.
Phone and email were doing the heavy lifting.
Vendor interactions relied on legacy channels at every stage.
Make the marketplace truly digital — permanently.
The pandemic forced the urgency; vendors needed the permanence.
“Phone and email were doing the heavy lifting — for one of Europe's most important marketplaces.”
The Approach.
I proposed to BCA's C-Suite that we tackle the challenges in two parts.
Problem framing workshop.
Brought together senior stakeholders from product, engineering, commercial and operations to align on direction, roles, priorities, target audience, and the as-is customer journey — then ideated on what good could look like.
Accelerated design initiative.
A holistic solution allowing vendors to manage and sell stock themselves — increasing self-serve conversion, embedding intelligence and price recommendations, surfacing performance reports, and shipping a market-leading multi-device experience.
Discovery.
Knowing the problem before solving it.
With the cross-functional senior leadership team formed, we reviewed historical research and analytics, formulated jobs-to-be-done, and ran competitive and comparative research to define “what makes world-class” — taking those principles forward into design.
The resulting wireframe became a single source of truth for vendor validation and C-Suite buy-in.
Target vendors in deep-dive interviews, running in parallel with MVP development.
C-Suite stakeholder alignment secured at every gate of the process.
The Solution.
A unified selling experience for every device — inventory through to sale.
Vendors gained advanced reporting, intelligent pricing channels, and a brand-led experience consistent on mobile, tablet and desktop. The MVP shipped while research with 20 of the immediate target audience ran in parallel — letting the team pivot quickly if findings demanded it.
Results.
From UK launch to European rollout.
A successful UK launch became the direction-of-travel for European markets. The new selling experience also catalysed the evolution of BCA's buying experience — enabling anonymous digital transactions between vendors and buyers, increasing sale velocity, and unlocking new sales channels powered by marketplace data.
Vendors completed pre-sale checks online with zero to minimal admin intervention; issues were triaged digitally to the correct handling team.
CSAT for online stock management — directly supporting retention of key vendor accounts.
admin touch.
Pre-sale vehicle checks completed entirely online by vendors.
Testimonials.
From senior leadership at Constellation Automotive Group.
First-class leader who is able to extract maximum performance from any team. His clarity of strategic thinking was critical in Constellation being first to market.
One of the most talented design leaders I have worked with. A rare entrepreneurial mindset, key to the quick development of multiple products we launched as a team.
Up next.
BCA Buyer App
A trade buyer's digital assistant.
All case studies
Six projects across design leadership, product design and service design.