Auvion Dealer Platform Case Study
Client
Platform build
Location
Netherlands
Work
Automotive brokerage, Enschede
Relationship
Auvion is an automotive brokerage in Enschede. Private sellers bring them a car. Auvion finds the dealer who will pay the most for it. That sounds simple until you look at how it actually ran. Every offer moved by phone, email, and WhatsApp. Every round of bidding was someone's job to chase, record, and remember. It worked, and it did not scale, and the owner knew both things at once.
The problem
The bottleneck was not marketing and it was not the website. It was that the core of the business, the part that makes the money, lived in one person's inbox.
Dealers could not see what was available without being told. There was no way to run a fair, timed round where everyone bid against the same clock. Nothing was recorded in a way anyone could audit later. And growth made it worse, because every new dealer added another thread to chase.
No off-the-shelf product does this. Auction platforms are built for public marketplaces, not for a private network of vetted dealerships in one country with one regulator. The choice was to keep doing it by hand or to build the thing properly.
What we built
A private platform where approved dealers log in, see the vehicles Auvion has taken on, and bid on them in timed rounds.
Feature list, as bullets
Dealer accounts with an application and approval gate, so no one gets access without being checked first
Timed bidding rounds that open and close on a schedule, automatically, without anyone watching the clock
Live bid updates, so a dealer always knows where they stand
Email notifications when a bid is placed, beaten, or a round closes
A watchlist, so dealers can follow vehicles they care about
An admin side where the owner publishes vehicles, manages photos, edits listings after publishing, and controls dealer access
Dutch registration plate handling that formats correctly by plate generation, because getting that wrong looks amateur to a dealer
A full audit trail of every action taken in the system
Built entirely in Dutch, in the informal register the client's dealers actually use
How we worked
We built it in phases, live, with the client testing every piece as it landed. Nothing was hidden until a big reveal at the end.
That mattered because the client is not a developer. He is meticulous about his business and he tests things properly, which is the best kind of client to build software for. He found things. We fixed them. The things he asked for that were outside the agreed scope got priced openly rather than quietly absorbed or quietly dropped.
The platform went live in a staged cutover, with the existing data migrated and checked before anything was switched over.
The outcome
The platform is live. Approved dealers use it. Rounds open and close on their own. Every bid is recorded and every action is logged.
The part worth saying out loud: this is not a website with a form on it. It is production software running the commercial core of a real business in a regulated market, and the client owns all of it. The code, the accounts, the database, the domain. No lock-in, no monthly platform fee to us, no hostage situation if he ever wants to work with someone else.
