With over 60% of auctions now conducted through their mobile app. This initiative has resulted in 400,000 app downloads, 40,000 daily bidders, and up to 5,000 bidders in a single auction.
Bidding is at the heart of the Copart business. Customers need to be able to place bids in real time, based on up-to-the-second information on competing bids. The need was to build an end-to-end mobile solution that the business could run on. With the VB3 bidding technology at the core, Accellor developed the Copart mobile app and integrated it into backend systems. Complex functionality, real-time information, concurrent bidders, and non-negotiable performance levels required us to ensure the highest levels of usability, responsiveness, reliability, scalability and resilience from every part of the solution.
Bids are won and lost in seconds, and bidders can get very demanding in what information they need before they place a bid. We set out to make the bid timer the centerpiece of our design. It is incredibly hard to implement a bid timer that handles hundreds of bids every second with negligible latency yet occupying only a small portion of the tiny screen estate available to mobile app developers. Packing in and synchronizing information on the latest high bid, last 2 bids, bidder location, bid countdowns and bid conflict management was the most challenging (and our favourite) part of the project. The result is an amazingly simple interface for the bidder that provides vehicle information, competing bidder information and a call-to-action bid timer, all in one place. Small screen, Big experiences.
Like many enterprise apps, the Copart bidder app does most of its hard work behind the scenes. Vehicles are constantly coming into Copart's yards where they are assessed, valued and approved for auction. At this point, they are entered into the bidding engine, integrated into Copart's award winning multi-bid auction platform and made available to bid on. When you consider that Copart can have over 100,000 vehicles on auction at any point in time in 160 different locations, the scale and complexity of Copart's operations start to become very real. To enable the faster processing of vehicles, Accellor helped develop a solution that uses a tablet app for yard workers to complete their tasks and workflow, automating its entry into the bidding engine and then serving that information to the bidders’ mobile app and other channels. Using physical yard locations, vehicle types, assessment checklists, business process workflows, user preferences, bidding rules, and constraints, we developed and delivered the capability required to deliver a one stop solution that takes Copart's vehicles from yard to bidder. 400,000 app downloads, 40,000 bidders every day, and up to 5,000 bidders on a single auction, Copart's mobile apps have transformed the way Copart does business with their customers. Built natively for iOS, Android and Windows phones, not only do the mobile apps provide a convenient way for bidders to participate, the apps have become the preferred way to bid. Today it is hard to imagine Copart's business without mobile apps, yet only two years ago Copart had no mobile presence to speak off. A great example of how a business enterprise mobility can transform an already successful business.
