Copart: Auctions Mobilized
We built a mobile app for Copart for their large vehicle bidding business. In under 2 years, Copart went from no mobile presence to transacting over 60% of their auctions via their mobile channel.
Copart is one of the largest and most successful vehicle auction businesses in the world. Selling over 1.1 million vehicles annually in 4 continents With over 160 physical yard locations and 5,000 employees; Copart operates an extremely successful physical and online auction operation. Powered by their award winning auction technology VB3™, Copart provides powerful multi bid capabilities to its customers. Accellor helped Copart take their vehicle bidding capability mobile, delivering stunning results; in under 2 years, Copart have gone from no mobile presence to transacting over 60% of their auctions via the mobile channel.
Making Wishlists a Breeze
Bidding is at the heart of the Copart business. Customers need to be able to place bids in real time, based on up to the second information on competing bids. The need was to build an an end to end mobile solution that the business could run on. With the VB3 bidding technology at the core, Accellor developed the Copart mobile app and integrated into backend systems. Complex functionality, real-time information, concurrent bidders, and non-negotiable performance levels required us to ensure the highest levels of usability, responsiveness, reliability, scalability and resilience from every part of the solution.
Big Experiences
Bids are won and lost in seconds, and bidders can get very demanding in what information they need before they place a bid. We set out to make the bid timer the centrepiece of our design. It is incredibly hard to implement a bid timer that handles hundred of bids every second with negligible latency, yet occupying only a small portion of the tiny screen estate available to mobile app developers. Packing in and synchronizing information on latest high bid, last 2 bids, bidder location, bid countdowns and bid conflict management was the most challenging (and our favourite) part of the project. The result is an amazingly simple interface for the bidder that provides vehicle information, competing bidder information and a call to action bid timer all in one place. Small screen, Big experiences.
From Yard to Bidder
Like many enterprise apps, the Copart bidder app does most of its hard work behind the scenes. Vehicles are constantly coming into Copart's yards where they are assessed, valued and approved for auction. At this point they are entered into the bidding engine and Integrating into Copart's award winning multi-bid auction platform and made available to bid on. When you consider that Copart can have over a 100,000 vehicles on auction at any point in time in 160 different locations, the scale and complexity of Copart's operations start to become very real. To enable the faster processing of vehicles Accellor helped develop a solution that uses a tablet app for yard workers to complete their tasks and workflow, automating its entry into the bidding engine and then serving that information to the bidders mobile app and other channels.Using physical yard locations, vehicle types, assessment checklists, business process workflows, user preferences, bidding rules, and constraints; we developed and delivered the capability required to deliver a one stop solution that takes Copart's vehicles from yard to bidder.
Going, Going, Gone!
400,000 app downloads. 40,000 bidders everyday, and up to 5,000 bidders on a single auction; Copart's mobile apps have transformed the way Copart does business with it's customers. Built natively for iOS, Android and Windows phone, not only do the mobile apps provide a convenient way for bidders to participate, the apps have become the preferred way to bid. Today it is hard to imagine Copart's business without mobile apps, yet only two years ago Copart had no mobile presence to speak off. A great example of how a business enterprise mobility can transform an already successful business.
