Auction bidding and inventory platform for a used-car importer in Cyprus

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The challenge

The owner carried the whole calculation in his head and a spreadsheet, and the record of a car stopped once it was won.

It buys mainly at auction in Japan through an export agent, and from the UK and mainland Europe when the numbers favour it, and sells retail from a showroom and wholesale to other dealers on the island. Its reputation rests on clean cars with verified mileage and no accident history, to the point where local mechanics and test stations send it customers. A sister company offers the finance.

The owner priced every candidate by hand, from a yen or sterling bid through fees, freight, duty, VAT and reconditioning to a Cyprus selling price and a margin he would accept, then lodged the bid with his agent before the sale closed. Stock, costs and customers lived in a spreadsheet, Word documents and WhatsApp, with a WordPress website linked to none of it.

Sourcing and bidding

A car bought at a Japanese auction passes through the agent's fee, the auction house's fee, export paperwork, six to eight weeks of sea freight, marine insurance, Cyprus import duty and VAT, single vehicle approval, an MOT and registration, before a battery or a service is considered. The owner carried all of this in his head and a spreadsheet, worked through each sale list as it was published, and sent his bids to the agent before the sale, because bidding on the Japanese route is not live: the agent holds a ceiling for each lot and the dealer learns afterwards whether it was won.

Import duty on Japanese cars had fallen from ten percent to two percent and then to nothing inside a year as the trade agreement phased the tariff out, while the rules for European cars moved separately. Sea freight changed every month. The agent's fee was three percent on a standard purchase but four or five on a car over ten million yen bought on a deposit, so the same lot cost a different amount depending on how it was paid for.

The average price the auction platform quoted for a model was misleading, because buyers in Malaysia, Singapore and Malta bid for the same lots with higher home markets behind them. His real reference was the UK: the cost of bringing the same car in from a UK auction, and whether Japan could beat it by ten to fifteen thousand euros, enough to justify three months of capital at sea instead of two weeks. He checked the UK listings and the Cyprus market by hand every month, and the margin he wanted moved with the car: twenty percent gross on a twenty thousand euro car that would sell in weeks, forty percent on a large German SUV that would sit. None of it was written down anywhere a member of staff could use.

Stock, sales and paperwork

Once a car was won, its record stopped at the winning bid. The bid sat in the message thread with the agent, the invoice and the shipping documents arrived by email, and the costs after arrival were noted in the spreadsheet if someone remembered: the battery nine cars in ten needed after weeks on a ship, the tyres, a service that ran to a thousand euros on the heavier cars, and three to six hundred euros of approval, MOT and registration. The owner budgeted an allowance per car and learnt the real figure once the car was on the forecourt.

The spreadsheet was the stock list and it lived on the owner's laptop, out of reach of his phone. Staff asked him what was coming, because the cars still on the water existed nowhere they could see, and a five thousand euro deposit made a car reserved only if someone updated the row.

Selling was done by appointment, because there was nothing to send an enquirer beyond a screenshot of the website. The sales team could not close on price without the owner, since the floor for each car was his calculation, and the discount they could give, five hundred euros on a Japanese car and a thousand on a European one, had been passed on by word of mouth.

The website held the listings in a plugin, with VIN numbers and full specifications, but nothing else talked to it, so a car was entered twice and marked sold in two places or in one. The site ranked for its own name and three variations of it, had no visibility in AI answers, and carried too little text to rank for anything else, so leads came from paid social advertising and the owner could not see which spend produced which sale.

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The solution

ZingZee built one platform, run from a phone or a laptop, that holds the whole trade from the first auction listing to the handover.

The landed-cost calculator came first, because every other tool depends on a landed cost the owner trusts, then the inventory, the watchers and automated bidding, the pipeline and brochure, and last the connection to the website, which stayed on WordPress as a render target for the inventory and no longer holds a second list.

What we built

The platform runs on a managed database and a serverless frontend in the dealer's own name, with the watchers and the bidding as scheduled workers, so the dealer owns the system and pays only for what it uses.

What was hard

How it was delivered

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What is next

The marketing tools built for the dealer's paid campaigns will read from the same inventory, so the cars with the best margin get the budget and a car that sells stops advertising the same day. Workshop job cards will feed the ledger, and the aged-stock view will flag cars over ninety days for a price decision. The watchers, the calculator and the bidding suit any importer buying at auction abroad and selling into a smaller market, and the platform can be set up for another dealer from the preferences table.