9:30 am, July 10, 2024
Mfldirect is a name that’s known to a lot of car dealers looking for good quality, low mileage and well-maintained vehicles, and now the business has updated its platform to make buying easier and simpler.
To better serve its trade customers, it’s now adding new offerings to its e-commerce platform including an auction feature and inspected vehicles.
The business is part of Motability Operations, the organisation that delivers the Motability Scheme leasing cars to over 760,000 disabled people across the UK, and sells all of its de-fleeted stock.
This means there are a huge number of vehicles coming through mfldirect that can be purchased by dealers for stock, and because of the nature of the business these cars are maintained through franchised dealer networks and often do lower mileage.
Damian Oton, chief commercial officer for Motability Operations, spoke to Car Dealer’s James Batchelor about the recent changes and explained what this means for people using the platform.
‘It’s simple by design,’ he said. ‘An inspected product does exactly what it says on the tin, we’ve got [cars] that are fully inspected by professional inspectors.
‘So these aren’t inspections by an end consumer that’s trying to sell a car or anything else.
‘These are inspected by professional inspectors at one of our refurbishment sites. The inspection report is what we use to understand how we want to refurbish our products.’
Talking about the new auction pricing, he added: ‘Auction pricing is much like anyone recognises in the online market now, albeit we’ve tried to take the best of everything that’s in the market and bring it into one place so that customers can use something that’s incredibly simple.’
Mfldirect is taking a customer-centric approach to its e-commerce platform and has done extensive research to create what Oton believes is a ‘much more comprehensive offering’.
He said: ‘We’re doing it because customers have asked us to do it. Quite simply, we’ve got a really interesting mix of customers that come on to mfldirect, some incredibly large businesses that everyone would recognise.
‘They want to buy hundreds of cars in a day, and then they want to get on with running their business with all the kind of confidence that comes from buying from a business like us that’s been around for a while and that they can trust.
‘Equally, we’ve had smaller buyers turn around to us and say, look, I’m interested in ones and twos, I really need a bit more detail on some of those cars and I want to get value from being involved in the auction process.
‘So we’ve listened to them and we’ve brought them on board, and what we’ve ended up with is something we think is a much more comprehensive offering for them.’
You can watch the interview in full where Oton also discusses the used car market, electric vehicle uptake and online retailing by clicking play on the video above.
