Toyota Tsusho Corporation is one of the largest trading companies in Japan. It consists of about 700 companies around the world with headquarters in Tokyo and Nagoya.

One of the main activities of TTC is production, sale and distribution of Toyota cars, but there are 5 more divisions, closely cooperating under single management of the corporation:

• Production of steel, aluminum and metal products, including those for the automotive industry;
  
• Production of automotive and aircraft components, including spare details;
  
• Design and construction of automotive plants, power plants and energy infrastructure, alternative energy and industrial engineering projects;
  
• Sales of organic and inorganic chemicals and promotion of environmentally friendly products;
  
• Food industry, consumer goods trade.
  
  

Customer

The client contacted the Y-Tech team with the idea of creating a marketplace for used cars. The marketplace is planned to be launched first in the CIS countries, particularly in Kazakhstan, and then in the European Union.

Representatives of Toyota Tsusho Corporation together with their partner, a Japanese integrator, performed an analysis of the automobile market, its capacity and development trends. Based on the data collected, the partners prepared a brief description of the functionality and usage scenarios of the marketplace. Our team was tasked with fine-tuning the usage scenarios to the specifics of the regional market and writing a full-fledged technical assignment.

Challenge

The marketplace connects customers and sellers of used cars. Firstly, the marketplace will sell cars from Toyota's trade-in network of official dealers. After the launch, other brands will be added through partnerships with dealerships of other car brands.

The main problem with selling used cars is checking the real technical condition and history of the car: data on theft, real mileage, accidents, inspections and fines. Often when selling a car in a trade-in, the owners try to hide important information. In order to avoid hiding critical data, we include the following functionality:

• integration with regional car inspection services that collect data from governmental and commercial sources and registries
  
• integration with banks (auto loans) and insurance companies
  
• development of a service for car mechanics at car dealerships and trade-in departments. When a mechanic checks the car, he records the results of technical inspection in a special electronic form, not on paper. This way, the data remains in the system and is not lost.

Solution

There are 4 key user roles

User roles

Moderator

controls the quality of the ads and their compliance with the rules for posting on the marketplace.

Dealer representative

puts up advertisements for cars that are in a trade-in salon, and communicates with potential buyers.

Customer

sees the dealer's ads and a report on the car's technical condition in the car card, and understands its actual technical condition. The report is already prepared by the platform and uploaded into each car's card.

Representatives of banks and insurance companies

A bank representative or loan officer helps to prepare a car loan application and selects the most advantageous terms based on the buyer's credit history. The dealership's insurance brokers get an insurance for car when customer buys it.

Project implementation stage

The project is at the stage of defining the business logic, basic operational processes, working out the billing and storage of personal data. This stage precedes the development phase. Our team helped TTC representatives to describe marketplace usage scenarios considering regional specifics, then we drafted technical specification and prepared technical documentation. Our UI/UX designers drew prototypes for each marketplace user role.

Tech stack

FastAPI

Docker

Сelery

JavaScript

Webpack

PostgreSQL

Redis

Pgbouncer

Centrifuge

Websocket

Figma