Cars24: Helping millions of customers in the second-hand car market buy and sell with ease
About Cars24
Founded in 2015, Cars24 is an ecommerce platform with a mission to revolutionize the way cars are bought and sold. From financing to doorstep delivery, the company helps both sellers and buyers get the best deals by being the intermediary party.
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Contact usCars24 migrates its customer-facing tech-stack to Google Cloud for quicker growth, leveraging BigQuery to better understand customers’ needs and GKE for platform flexibility and scalability.
Google Cloud results
- Enables data-based decision making with BigQuery
- Uses Google Cloud services like Pub/Sub and Cloud Functions to reduce Time to Market significantly
- Manages, deploys and scales containerized applications at minimal cost with GKE
Launching in a new market in just 5 weeks
There has been a massive boom in the used car market in India since the pandemic due to a shortage of new cars being manufactured. To keep up with the demand for used car sales and ownership, one of India’s largest ecommerce platforms for pre-owned vehicles, Cars24, is stepping up its game by helping people buy and sell their cars with ease.
As an ecommerce company, technology is a pivotal part of Cars24’s growth strategy. The platform cannot afford to fail, since customers are browsing their website around the clock. Beyond that, Cars24 is looking to innovate and better understand the needs of customers through data. As a first step, the company migrated all of its B2C infrastructure to Google Cloud in early August 2020, after having used a host of different Google Cloud products across its tech stack since June 2020.
"Even though we have been using Google Cloud products for parts of our business, deciding to migrate our entire operations to Google Cloud was a big decision, but one that I am glad to have made because of the reliability of the platform," says Marut Singh, Chief Technology Officer at Cars24, adding that with growth being a priority, it is important to ensure that the customer facing side of the business remains highly available at all times.
"Even though we have been using Google Cloud products for parts of our business, deciding to migrate our entire operations to Google Cloud was a big decision, but one that I am glad to have made because of the reliability of the platform."
—Marut Singh, Chief Technology Officer, Cars24Analyzing data quickly for continuous platform improvement
When buyers purchase a vehicle from Cars24, they are provided with value-added services like financing options and extended warranties upon checkout. For sellers, Cars24 uses its proprietary machine learning algorithm to provide a very accurate quotation so that they can decide whether they want to proceed in listing their car for sale. All of this, according to Singh, is possible because of Google Cloud’s suite of products that support the multiple tests conducted by the team.
To understand what their customers expect and to support clickstream data and analytics, Cars24 uses BigQuery to collect and make sense of all the data that comes through its platform. "It’s extremely easy to manage the massive amount of data with BigQuery and get the insights we want quickly," says Singh. "We want to understand whether users are getting exactly what they want out of our platform, so that we can redesign our workflows to meet their needs."
As Cars24 often runs two-week sprint cycles, the ability to cherry pick and analyze data in real-time is key, so that the team is able to use those results to create the next iteration and release new features.
For data visualization, Cars24 uses Data Studio for an overview of data, leveraging the interactive dashboards to connect and compare information from BigQuery, with Google Analytics 360 (GA360) and other channels. This provides a comprehensive view of how customers are interacting on the platform so that the sales and marketing team can better tailor their next campaign and make data-led improvements to the platform.
"Some services require heavy compute resources, while others are memory-hungry. This means you have to cluster them differently to maximize performance, and Google Kubernetes Engine provides us the control to do that."
—Marut Singh, Chief Technology Officer, Cars24A developer-friendly infrastructure to support growth
According to Singh, growth has been a priority for the company, which is why they have decided to deploy all their infrastructure on Kubernetes, and use Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), supported by Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Logging to deploy, manage, and scale all of its containerized applications. "Google Kubernetes Engine provided a very clear value proposition for us because it is very developer-friendly, with detailed documentation and great support," says Singh.
Focusing on the business bottom line, the flexibility of GKE helps keep Cars24 agile. "Some services require heavy compute resources, while others are memory-hungry. This means you have to cluster them differently to maximize performance, and Google Kubernetes Engine provides us the control to do that," says Singh.
Launching in multiple countries at speed with Multi Cluster Ingress
Cars24 has now expanded into Thailand, UAE, Australia, and Indonesia, and is looking to continue scaling at speed. "It takes us only 22 person days now to launch a new website in a new country, versus 110. To maintain an optimal response time for our users, we use Multi Cluster Ingress to route them to the right services," explains Singh. As all of the company’s core services have been deployed in India, Multi Cluster Ingress leverages the common functionalities required across all the different markets and applies them to every deployment. This takes away the challenges of having to set up everything from scratch every time a new website is launched.
Once the websites are set up, the teams in each market can then proceed to tailor their platform to suit the tastes and preferences of their individual market, using data from BigQuery. "Overall, Google Cloud gives us an integrated platform where we don’t have to worry about how the infrastructure is being managed, even across multi-zone deployments," explains Singh.
Having strong support from the Google team has also given Cars24 the confidence to launch quickly in different markets around the world. "The Google team has really provided us with the support we need, and are always willing to go the extra mile to inform us about the intricacies of each product so that we can make informed decisions," says Singh.
Cars24 is in the midst of building a new DIY service, which will help users complete their transaction entirely online and give them a price range without visiting physical stores. "We understand that making a car purchase is a big decision that’s very personal, so the entire process needs to be smooth," says Singh. To achieve this we need a scalable and reliable platform that can be used to roll out new solutions quickly and support our mission. "Whether it’s data or indexing, or general infrastructure requirements, I believe that Google Cloud will be able to provide us with the best solutions as we work to bring our business to the next level."
"The Google team has really provided us with the support we need, and are always willing to go the extra mile to inform us about the intricacies of each product so that we can make informed decisions."
—Marut Singh, Chief Technology Officer, Cars24Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
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About Cars24
Founded in 2015, Cars24 is an ecommerce platform with a mission to revolutionize the way cars are bought and sold. From financing to doorstep delivery, the company helps both sellers and buyers get the best deals by being the intermediary party.