The Exchange

CarExpert's mission is to make buying the right new car quicker and easier. For years that meant delivering leads to dealers: quality content, quality leads, but the buyer experience from that point was out of our hands. The acquisition of a boutique car brokerage, gave us the chance to own the end-to-end experience. The challenge was that the broker was running entirely on Pipedrive, and we had ambitions to scale to hundreds of cars per month.

Rather than replacing everything at once, we identified the specific bottlenecks to scaling and built around them, keeping what worked in Pipedrive while building a custom layer for the workflows unique to our model.

My role

I was design lead across the project, working closely with the Director of Product, the PM, and the Director of Marketplace to shape the product's direction. I ran user research, led workshops, owned the design end-to-end in Figma, and mentored a junior designer who worked alongside me to complete delivery.

Research

I interviewed dealers directly to understand their existing ways of working, their attitudes towards car brokers, and where they found friction in similar tools. I sat alongside them as they used comparable systems and documented both the strengths and the frustrations. In parallel I ran frequent workshops and one-on-one sessions with the broker team and key internal stakeholders as we worked through the process flows together.

The core problem was an over-reliance on email at every stage. Quotes were being requested, submitted, and compared over email, with too much manual effort involved and messages getting lost or forgotten on both sides.

Drilling into the quoting process specifically, we found that dealers had no reliable structure for responding to customer requirements. There was no guarantee all requested accessories would be accounted for, and if a dealer needed to offer an alternative (a different colour, a cheaper option, a longer wait for the preferred spec) there was no consistent way to flag that or compare it against the original.

What we built

Dealer selection and quote request

A custom UI for the CarExpert broker team to identify the most appropriate dealers for a customer's requirements, prioritising by proximity and past performance.

Structured quote submission for dealers

Dealers complete quotes against the customer's exact specification. Each requested accessory generates its own field in the quote form, making it impossible to miss one. Dealers can duplicate a quote and modify it to offer alternatives, such as a different colour or a faster delivery option, and any variations are flagged in the UI for easy identification by the broker team.

Quote comparison

The key screen in the broker workflow. Compares quotes across price, delivery timeline, and trade-in offers side by side, including offers from both the selling dealer and our wholesale trade-in partners. This gives the broker team a true holistic picture of which deal works best for the customer, and what the final changeover price looks like depending on who buys the trade-in.

Secure document upload

Buyers needed to supply sensitive identity documents. Emailing these was a genuine security risk. We built a simple, no-login-required upload flow using a secure link sent to the buyer, with no account creation needed.

Intent to purchase, purchase orders, and digital contracts

Post-launch, we iterated based on broker and buyer feedback. Customer-signed intent-to-purchase forms, automated purchase order flows, and digital contract signing closed the loop on the full transaction lifecycle.

Delivery approach

Given the complexity and the business pressure to move quickly, we identified screens and flows that could be completed and handed off independently as the project progressed, rather than waiting for a single big-bang release. This kept engineering unblocked and gave the broker team early visibility into the product as it took shape.

Outcome

The structured quote submission replaced email PDF loops entirely, making the quote process significantly faster and the email back-and-forth across quotes, documents, and contracts massively reduced. By March 2026 the platform covered the full transaction lifecycle, from first quote through to signed contract, in a single system.

CarExpert has seen a doubling in deals won per month during this period, driven by a combination of initiatives of which the Exchange is a meaningful part.