Car Classifieds Marketplace for a South African Listings Business
Designed and built a clickable dealer portal for a South African car classifieds marketplace: stock synced from a feed with a price rating against comparable cars, a lead board with a 1-hour reply target, and buyer chats and calls that run through the platform without exposing the buyer's phone number.
Most of our work is under NDA. Per agreement, we can share the work but not the company details - all names and identifying information shown here have been changed.
Dealer dashboard, stock list, stock item, leads board and lead detail. Every one of the 24 cars and 22 leads opens its own page, and the branch switcher filters all of them.
Great, good, fair or high price from the median of comparable listings (same model, year band, mileage band and region). Below 8 comparables a car gets no rating instead of a guess.
Leads still unanswered after an hour are listed oldest first on the dashboard, and every lead card shows its waiting or reply time against the target.
A two-branch dealer on the Pro package: 24 cars from the feed and manual entry, 22 leads across chats, calls, test drives and finance interest, and 5 dealer users.
Witkoppie grew out of a print classifieds title and still ran on an ageing listings site. Dealers sent stock as emailed spreadsheets, private sellers picked the wrong model and year, and buyers saw the same car three times at three prices. Scam listings slipped through a shared moderation inbox, sellers were phoned on their real numbers for months after selling, and dealers could not tell which leads came from Witkoppie.
Voorlig covers all three sides of the marketplace: a mobile-first buyer app, seller tools for private sellers and dealers, and an operator console for moderation, fraud and dealer onboarding. The demo shows the dealer portal, where stock syncs from a feed, every car is rated against comparable listings, and every lead is tracked from first message to sold or lost without exposing anyone's phone number.
Selling a car online in South Africa touches several rulebooks at once: POPIA for every buyer's and seller's personal information, the Consumer Protection Act for dealer sales, the National Credit Act for finance, and ECTA disclosures for anything sold online. Witkoppie also had to fix the basics of stock, trust and lead tracking.
Dealers emailed spreadsheets, private sellers typed in their own make, model and year, and the same car appeared several times at different prices. Listings needed to come from a feed or a VIN and registration lookup, not free text.
A cheap Toyota Hilux, photos copied from another advert and "pay a deposit and the courier will deliver" reached the site because moderation was a shared inbox and nobody could see duplicate photos across accounts.
Buyers called sellers on their real numbers, so private sellers got spam for months after selling. POPIA expects the minimum personal information to be collected and shared, so contact had to go through the platform.
About 600 dealers pay a monthly package, but none could tell which leads came from Witkoppie. Without lead sources and response times, every renewal turned into an argument about value.
Mapped 12 user roles and 52 screens across the buyer app, private seller tools, dealer portal and operator console, and the data model for listings, photos, price ratings, conversations, masked calls, test drives, leads, finance referrals, history checks, packages, invoices, feed imports, fraud signals and disputes. Wrote down the rules the design follows: POPIA, dealer and private sale labels under the CPA, finance shown as an estimate with a referral to a credit provider registered under the NCA, ECTA disclosures, VIN and registration data from licensed partners and VAT as a setting.
Built the dealer portal's 5 key screens on a production dashboard kit, signed in as the principal of a fictional two-branch dealer: the dashboard with 4 KPI cards against last month, leads by source per week, stock needing attention and package usage; the stock table with price rating and row actions; the stock item with feed-locked fields, dealer warranty and separately shown fees; the leads board; and the lead detail with conversation, masked call log, test drives, notes, status history and lead disputes. All actions run on local state.
VIN and registration lookup and history checks from TransUnion Auto or Lightstone Auto, finance referrals to registered credit providers such as WesBank, MFC or Absa, card and instant EFT payments, debit orders, CIPC company data and identity checks for dealer onboarding, masked calling and SMS through Twilio or Clickatell, WhatsApp and push notifications, and image moderation with duplicate photo detection. Plus the buyer and seller apps for web, iOS and Android, the operator console, staff roles and an audit log of every moderation, suspension, onboarding decision, refund and staff view of a conversation.
Fields controlled by the nightly stock feed are locked and marked with a padlock, and Unlink from feed hands a car back to manual editing. Changes requested, fewer than 4 photos, feed errors, cars over 60 days and cars priced High all surface on the dashboard.
Each car shows how far it sits from the median of similar cars nearby, the 25th to 75th percentile range, how many comparables it used and the confidence, so a dealer can see why a car is rated High before changing the price.
The buyer's number stays masked unless they choose to share it, the dealer calls through a proxy number, calls are logged without recordings, and a chat asking to move to another app raises a safety banner reminding both sides that Voorlig never asks for a deposit through a chat.
Each lead carries its source, assigned salesperson, reply time and status history, and cost per lead is the package price divided by leads. A lead that is spam, a duplicate or not a genuine buyer can be disputed with Witkoppie, so the numbers dealers see at renewal are numbers they trust.

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Enterprise Software Engineering - Human + AI
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Main corporate office and leadership operations
North America Office
548 Market Street, PMB 12345, San Francisco, CA 94104
Client operations and business development
India Office
402 Shivalik Shilp II, SG Highway, Ahmedabad 380015
Engineering and delivery center
Enterprise Software Engineering - Human + AI
Contact Us
Locations
Global Headquarters
21 Merchant Road, 3rd Floor, Singapore 058267
Main corporate office and leadership operations
North America Office
548 Market Street, PMB 12345, San Francisco, CA 94104
Client operations and business development
India Office
402 Shivalik Shilp II, SG Highway, Ahmedabad 380015
Engineering and delivery center
© 2026 - Copyright. All Rights reserved Oceanlab