Private party car sales are often challenging due to haggling and trust issues. How might Carvana address this while integrating its products and services?

Outcomes

Dealer partnerships

The cameras I designed opened up the industry-recognizable Spinner asset to strategic partners while improving production efficiency for both partners and internal purchasing teams.

Vehicle listing experiments

The marketplace studies provided insights that were key in developing native iOS and Android products while enhancing web features that improved the overall customer experience.

Ancillary products and service

Experiments from this project boosted the performance of ancillary services going into the delivery boom of 2020.

Process

Research

We conducted multiple workshops with executive stakeholders and Carvana’s Special Projects team. These sessions helped us uncover the potential of the marketplace and its value to the organization. Key activities included:

Developing value propositions
Prioritizing feature sets
Outlining the customer journey

Rather than focusing on private sales brokerages and creating unnecessary competition, we drew inspiration from industry leaders and successful models in property listings and rental bookings. The challenge was to adapt our internal tools and data to align with consumer expectations.

Process

Feature Development

Cameras

Carvana’s proprietary camera technology was originally designed for warehouse use, relying on complex hardware and tracking systems. Adapting this technology to mobile phones required extensive research and field studies. Considerations included:

Does AR work for our customer?
If so, how do we accommodate environmental conditions like broken asphalt, parking barriers, and walls?
How much automation is too much automation?

Photograph of Carvana’s 360° photo booth courtesy of JBI

Using the Marketplace app to produce a 360° spin for your listing.

Each listing is started by creating a 360° spin of your car by walking around it with using the camera in the Marketplace app.

Once complete, we parse through the photo array to create galleries and collect shots for valuation and conditioning.

From here, nearly everything is prefilled and waiting to be confirmed by the user. If something is off, we can edit or delete the information.

Casting a wide net with media-rich listings

By leveraging the VIN and photo array from the spin, we’ve created a media-rich listing for their vehicle that includes all the necessary information with a realistic, no-haggle price backed by proprietary, AI-driven data analysis.

These listings would be distributed across the Internet to third-parties which would open Carvana’s ecosystem of products and services up to many more customers: vehicle delivery, off-site repairs, financing, warranties, etc. would now be accessible to anyone purchasing a used vehicle.

Conclusion

The project highlights Carvana’s potential to innovate in private party car sales. By focusing on user needs and leveraging Carvana’s strengths, we created a concept that streamlined the sales process, built trust in the brand, and created leads into Carvana’s ecosystem.