Private Car Negotiation Flow for AutoTrader's MakeMyDeal
Agile Delivery Lead·AutoTrader / Cox Automotive·2014-2015
Retail & MarketplaceUX Research & DesignGrowth & Engagement
MakeMyDeal enables dealers and consumers to build meaningful business relationships and come together on the terms of the deal online. And it does that all while alleviating some of shoppers' top frustrations and giving them an online experience that they prefer.
The impact
Low-pressure negotiation workflows live for buyers and dealers. Pilot dealerships saw improved customer satisfaction, and the work informed AutoTrader's broader digital retail strategy.
MakeMyDeal brought car deal-making online before the showroom visit, giving buyers a way to make private offers and dealers a way to respond, counter, and upsell through a structured, compliant platform. I led three cross-functional scrum teams through the development of its core negotiation toolset.
Encoding a negotiation that everyone does differently
Car buying is one of the most anxiety-laden consumer experiences there is. Buyers do not trust the process, dealers have their own pressures, and the moment the two sit across a desk it rarely goes well for either. MakeMyDeal moved the negotiation online, before the showroom, so both sides arrive prepared.
The hard part was not the UI. It was that "a car deal" is not one thing. Trade-ins, financing add-ons, warranties, and F&I logic varied dealership by dealership, and sales, F&I, and legal each had a different, confident definition of what "correct" looked like in a given flow. Build to one of those definitions and you ship something the others reject. So leading three scrum teams across design, engineering, and QA, the actual job was reconciling those definitions into one model the law and the lot could both live with.
The two pieces everything hinged on were the offer/counteroffer model and the compliance layer. I built structured messaging with guardrails so a buyer could make a confident private offer without accidentally stepping outside legal bounds, and a dealer could respond or upsell without muddying the deal state. We tested with real buyers and dealership staff throughout and iterated on what actually happened when people used it, not on what the stakeholders predicted they would.
What this built
- A digital pre-negotiation model that reduced showroom pressure. Buyers arrived with clarity on where their deal stood, and dealers spent less time managing first-contact friction.
- A compliant, scalable F&I workflow. The logic built for trade-ins, warranties, and add-ons set a foundation AutoTrader could expand across more dealerships and deal types.
- A template for digital retail at Cox Automotive. The patterns and thinking from MakeMyDeal directly shaped AutoTrader's next moves in digital retailing.
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