8:40 am, April 26, 2024
Cazoo’s new online marketplace has now gone live, more than a month after the firm announced its drastic change of model.
Car Dealer reported in March that the online disruptor had pulled out of used car sales and was planning to take on the likes of Auto Trader.
The plans raised more than a few eyebrows within the automotive industry but the new service has now gone live, with more than 12,000 vehicles listed on the platform from the off.
Ironically, given Cazoo’s stated plans to overthrow the likes of Motors, many of the listings currently appearing on the new marketplace appear to have been placed by the rival firm.
Ads include a link to cars’ Motors pages, with Cazoo currently only offering limited descriptions.
The vast majority of other ads currently live on Cazoo’s site have come via dealer group Carsa, which was founded in 2020.
The firm has sites in Southampton, Bradford, Cannock, Durham, Mountsorrel, and Bolton.
It also offers buyers the chance to buy their car fully online, using a similar approach to the one Cazoo so spectacularly failed to make work.
The latest development comes after a bombshell announcement to investors last month, in which Cazoo said it would be ‘unwinding’ its stock and selling it via retail and wholesale channels.
It will also make further job cuts – following the large swathes of redundancies it announced last year – as it moves to being a marketplace.
As part of the change, one of Cazoo’s few remaining sites – in Bristol – has now also closed, according to BristolWorld.
Cazoo refused to comment on whether the closure had resulted in more job losses, when approached by Car Dealer earlier this week.
Speaking back in March, the firm’s CEO Paul Whitehead, who has since departed the company, said: ‘Transitioning Cazoo to a pure-play automotive marketplace business model leverages our key advantages: the nationally recognised and trusted Cazoo brand and the Cazoo ecommerce technology platform.
‘We have built a data-driven business for buying and selling cars, and having sold close to 160,000 cars we have demonstrated that there is robust demand for online transactions in the automotive market.
‘Our transition means we can now offer the UK’s 13,000 car dealers the chance to put their forecourt stock in front of the one million potential customers on average who visit the Cazoo website every month.
‘The UK used car market represents a significant opportunity for Cazoo, with approximately seven million transactions annually, worth an estimated £100bn.
‘We look forward to completing this transition and starting an exciting new chapter for Cazoo, building upon our investment in both the Cazoo brand and in our e-commerce technology platform.’
You can learn more about the history of Cazoo here. Alternatively, you can watch our special documentary all about the firm’s rise and fall below:
