NAPLES, Fla. -

A fully transactional e-commerce platform launched today by Car Lister allows dealers to buy used vehicles from private individuals — and take care of scheduling the inspection and transportation — directly from a mobile device.

In essence, the Bring Your Best Offer program connects dealers with private sellers, who are given “a direct pipeline to a dealer network looking to boost inventory,” Car Lister said.

“The BYBO program is the first of its kind for private sellers, and is the next step in bringing car selling into the 21st century,” Bryan Harmon — founder and chief executive officer at Car Lister parent company DreamWare — said in a news release.

“Our primary goal with Car Lister has always been to offer new, stress-free solutions that help improve the car buying experience,” Harmon added. “Our social platform was the first step in opening the doors for dealers and consumers to easily connect with one another across vast geographic plains, and our BYBO solution takes the process one step further.”

How it works:

  • The private seller uses the Car Lister app to list his or her car for sale. The private seller provides a VIN and selects the option to receive offers from dealers on that car.
     
  • The app then creates a listing title and vehicle description. The seller can upload images and video.  The listing includes a free vehicle history report.
     
  • Dealers have seven days to make a silent bid on the car. The seller can accept the highest bid at his or her discretion.
     
  • Should the seller accept the bid, then comes the inspection. That is performed by a qualified mechanic from YourMechanic (a Car Lister partner) who goes over to the seller’s location.
     
  • If the car passes inspection, transportation is done via uShip, which gets ahold of the seller to arrange vehicle pick-up and delivery to the dealership.
     
  • Once the dealer confirms the car is on his or her lot, the payment is transferred to the seller’s bank account.

More on Car Lister

For those unfamiliar with Car Lister, it is an app where sellers can list and buyers can shop for new and used cars via smartphone, tablet or desktop. Its parent company is DreamWare, a Naples, Fla.-based provider of Web applications and services to boost mobile e-commerce.

Harmon, the founder and CEO of DreamWare, spoke to Auto Remarketing in late December about the origins of Car Lister.

“We got started based off of e-commerce. We had a legitimate problem to solve in a different industry for accuracy of data, and just tried to scale. It really wasn’t solved before, and we were able to get that to work, he said of DreamWare. 

DreamWare would expand to other industries, including the automotive business, where it noticed a similar problem.

“This would have been three years ago, and at that point, initially, the way that every other website was listing a car for sale by the general public was, in our eyes, wrong. Three years ago, you still had to come up with all the titles, all the description — on Craigslist you still have to — from scratch … it was all on you, the user. So you had to come up with your own definitions and your own everything. And that actually has a real problem for accuracy. And especially to harness the power of the Internet, it’s an even bigger problem.

“And what I mean by that is … before the Internet, if you were to list your car for sale in the newspaper, and you didn’t really explain it properly, well, that’s OK. Because why? The person would actually come to your house to pick it up, to test drive it, to vailidate it. But on the Internet, it doesn’t work like that. The Internet allows access to that listing from outside of a 25- to 50-mile radius. It offers it throughout the whole country,” Harmon said.

And allowing anybody to just list a car in any form or fashion they choose, without knowledge of the car industry, can be problematic, he said.

“A used car is a one-of-a-kind object. It’s serialized, with a VIN number. So, to me, if I put a car in front of 100 people on these old systems and say ‘list a car,’ you’ll have a 100 different definitions, because everyone is going to type up slang, sentence structures the way that they want … you’ve got different definitions. That’s impossible: it’s a one-of-a-kind serialized object. So we controlled the flow of data differently and we saw that wasn’t being done.”

With this and other issues the company saw in that space, they continued to research. “And as we dug, dug, dug, dug, dug deeper, we realized there wasn’t a system that was full transactional for third party,” he said.

This presented an opportunity for the company. DreamWare launched Car Lister in October 2014, and it went live for dealerships and users in January 2015. 

More information can be found at www.carlister.co.