Private sellers listed from a registration lookup; buyers contacted them direct.
A vehicle marketplace for Northern Ireland, built from scratch — DVLA lookup on the listing form, dealer profiles with masked contact numbers, subscription memberships, and an inventory scraper that solved the cold-start problem before launch.
A marketplace is worthless empty — and nobody joins first
Northern Ireland had no classified listings platform of its own. Local dealers advertised on national sites, competing for attention against the whole UK. The client had the concept and the business model; the platform did not exist.
But a marketplace has a harder problem than a website. It is worth nothing empty, and it fills in the wrong order: dealers will not join a site with no buyers, and buyers will not return to a site with no cars. Launching with an empty database would have ended it in the first week.
Dealers will not join a site with no buyers. Buyers will not return to a site with no cars.
Solve the cold start first, then build the platform around it
The work split into two jobs — a full classified marketplace, and a way to fill it before anyone saw it. The second decided the shape of the first: every feature had to work against inventory no dealer had typed in by hand.
- Inventory imported before launch, with permission
Rather than opening empty, dealers’ existing stock was parsed from their current listings and imported in bulk. A dealer signed up and found their full inventory already live on the platform — the cold-start problem solved before it could bite.
- DVLA lookup on the listing form
A seller entered a registration plate and the form populated make, model, year, engine size, fuel type and colour automatically — removing the manual data entry that stops private sellers ever finishing a listing.
- Dealer profiles with masked contact
Every dealer got a profile carrying their inventory, contact details, map and website link. Phone numbers sat behind a reveal, so an enquiry stayed on the platform instead of leaking to a direct call.
- Subscriptions rather than per-listing fees
Dealer membership ran on tiered WooCommerce subscriptions, giving the platform recurring revenue and dealers a predictable cost regardless of how much stock they carried.
What the platform actually does
Listings carry a full specification — make, model, year, mileage, body type, transmission, engine size, fuel type, CO2 and price — with multi-image galleries and video uploaded straight from a phone. Buyers search on eight facets, view results on a map, save favourites and compare vehicles side by side.
Private sellers and dealers each get accounts and profiles, and enquiries route by email, phone or website. Underneath: WordPress with the STM Motors ecosystem heavily customised for the NI market, WooCommerce and Subscriptions for memberships, Stripe for payment, and Mailchimp and Instagram driving promotion.
What it reached
Dealers came from across Northern Ireland — Lisburn, Coleraine, Omagh, Ballywalter and beyond. The platform no longer trades; both figures are the ones the site itself displayed, taken from the September 2019 backup.
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