Dealer-to-dealer vehicle marketplace with two-tier trade-in appraisal

Wholesale trading between dealers had no shared visibility: dealers relied on auctions, brokers and personal relationships to know what was available elsewhere. Trade-in appraisal was worse — a salesperson, a manager, market data and often competing bids from other dealers all had to be reconciled verbally while a customer waited in the showroom.

Vehicle data compounded both problems. Decoded VIN data, dealer feed imports and manual entry all produced makes, models, trims and options in inconsistent shapes, and a marketplace's search and valuation are only as good as the taxonomy underneath them. Inventory also had to stay current without dealers listing manually, which meant ingesting feeds from dealer FTP/SFTP endpoints on a schedule, with partial failures that had to be visible rather than silently dropped.

Built a specification normalisation service that reconciles decoded VIN data into the platform's own taxonomy — makes, models, trims, bodies, engines, fuels, colours and options — with decoding attempts logged and status-tracked so a disputed specification can be traced to its source. Automated inventory ingestion from dealer feeds as scheduled commands, recording each import run and its errors as structured data instead of letting failures disappear.

The appraisal workflow — internal salesperson-manager offers and counter-offers running alongside external dealer bidding on the same vehicle — was modelled as a single dedicated service owning every state transition, the relationship between the internal and external positions, and the resulting notifications, rather than being spread across controllers. An explicit dealer connection graph plus blacklisting, including at brand level, governs which dealers can see which inventory and which customer vehicles, with permission changes recorded in an audit log. Real-time chat runs over a hosted websocket service so negotiation conversation sits alongside the formal offers, and the mobile app carries role-specific screen sets for salespeople, managers, bidders and buyers from one Laravel API.

Dealers search and filter each other's inventory instead of working through relationships and auctions, and inventory stays current without manual listing because it arrives on a schedule from dealer feeds with import errors surfaced as data. Trade-in appraisal became a managed workflow with internal approval and external bidding running in parallel, decision support for the manager computed directly rather than reconstructed from raw numbers, and a full offer/decision trail retained for review. Visibility between competing dealers is governed by an explicit, audited configuration rather than left open by default.

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