Modernizing a sales app for Asia’s largest pre-owned automotives business

When OLX presented the Cash My Car app for field partners, Daffodil conducted comprehensive usability testing to gauge the shortcomings. The major drawbacks of the app’s UI designed for the field partner personas were lengthy inspection time, high load time, and the limitation of being calibrated only for a desktop browser.

So the team set out to improve these aspects of the app and work on the inspection, customer care, and inventory-transaction management modules. The improvements are detailed as follows:

Inventory & Transaction

In the inventory and transaction side of the app, a new, multi-transactional CMS was developed. Each ‘car’ entity created during a sale or purchase of a pre-owned car could only be linked with a single Purchase Order (PO) or Sale Order (SO) in the previous CMS, whereas the Multi-Transactional CMS (MTCMS) allows multiple POs and SOs to be linked to the same entity.

So, with the recent improvement, if a car were to come back to the same field partner after being sold by them, the admin could duplicate its previously filled details for a new PO and then do the same for an SO during a resale. Based on the inspection report, the pricing of the car is determined using an internal algorithm.

Inspection

The vehicle inspector had to fill in each detail in the inspection form such as chassis number, model number, registration date, color and so on manually even for a car that came back to the same field partner after being sold by them. The Daffodil team has expedited this task drastically with an API call that would send a request when entering the registration number to dynamically fill in the other details.

The inspector can now take pictures and crop or rotate them, all within the app during an upload. Once all the details are filled and pictures are uploaded, verified and cleared, an inspection report is generated. The progress of the inspection report, the initial inspection form and time spent in the process is all tracked. OLX Cash My Car’s backend team keeps a close check on this data to ensure that the inspection time is consistently kept low and so, the inspection team is satisfied by the app’s usability.

PWA

The team used React and Node to transform the web app into a Progressive Web App (PWA). The app now runs on a desktop browser and additionally runs on a mobile browser just like a native app. The load time is reduced which further cuts down the processing time for the inspection team.

Customer Care

When the seller or the customer gets in touch with the customer care team, the team gets all the details of the end-user and their vehicle particulars as well. While taking these details manually took 5-10 minutes in the previous app, the new app does this in about 6 seconds. The time-to-resolution for customer grievances has come down drastically, thanks to fixes in caching, indexing and removal of redundant customer data.

Further Value Additions

While this functionality was not available earlier, the new improved app allows multiple photos and documents to be uploaded simultaneously, accelerating the inspection workflow further. In case a car was not selling because of a certain defect, it would be repaired. But there was no provision for factoring in the repair expense. The improved version allows the addition of a ‘maintenance’ cost field to the PO to recalculate the final pricing of the car following repairs.