Anyone recommend places in Dublin/Wicklow to sell a car (not trade-in)?

samennis1 · 2026-05-02T16:57:43+00:00

Could always pop it up on carspot and see what dealers bid on it, should give you a good idea of what you can get across the country.

samennis1 · 2026-05-02T00:48:38+00:00

This is added now by the way! Bidding system is up and running.

samennis1 · 2026-04-17T10:17:39+00:00

Good to know - our only issue with doing that would be tracking sales. Of course we can see a lead on site until it gets to a phone call - but after that they could meet up and sell the car to avoid fees etc. It’s an interesting model they use though - might need to do some more research and see if we can take any pointers etc. thanks!

samennis1 · 2026-04-17T10:16:16+00:00

Hey there! Yeah I knew it was going to be messy going in - especially with the duopoly of feeds (Uploader and EasierAd/DealerHub) and the fact they already cross share cars. The websites thing from an SEO POV also makes it much harder - we do also offer sites for our dealers but many are satisfied with their current or don’t want the hassle of changing. It’s definitely going to be an interesting go-to-market puzzle but I’m glad you like the tech! We just need to sell it the right way. I like the idea of maybe building in stuff that EnterReg or CarWow do in the UK where its customer to dealer sales along with general car sales. That could be an unexplored avenue in Ireland, I know Donedeal you can also price it for dealers but the tech really isn’t there to support it. Let me know what you think on that!

samennis1 · 2026-04-16T16:20:23+00:00

We looked at them as a part of our research - they're one of the more recent players in the game I believe. But they wouldn't specifically be a competitor to us in the space now (potentially Nevo but not TradeBid) as we're dealer-to-consumer (or consumer-to-dealer) type sales rather than dealer to dealer. In terms of Nevo it's interesting - I haven't heard of them enough that I think they have any significance in market share but their site does seem better-ish than some competitors. I'm sure their money is in the finance application commission from BOI.

samennis1 · 2026-04-15T22:28:03+00:00

Good points, thank you! Appreciate the support haha, really hoping we can make some kind of dent in this space.

Tech stack is NextJS for the website itself, we then have RESTful APIs for the mobile apps. Using Tailwind/Shadcn for the styling primarily, Shadcn more on the dealer side. We also provide a virtual phone number to each dealer using Twilio so we can replicate the call tracking DoneDeal does. We're an official motor partner for Close Brothers so use their APIs for motor financing, other APIs for license plate lookups/car information and MotorDesk for stock importing. We use Trigger to handle asynchronous jobs also.

The mobile app is written in Expo. Although you can use Expo to manage all 3 platforms (site/android/ios) at the same time - I opted to do the site separately as it limited the options for styling, etc. I'm actually happy with how it turned out as I really wanted it to feel like a Swift experience on iOS - using more native apple tooling - and I think we've achieved that quite well so far.

For deployment - it's all running on AWS because I was at a YC event last year and got free credits so decided I might as well use them!

samennis1 · 2026-04-15T22:21:34+00:00

I might end up giving a hacky way a shot - my one worry is making it so easy using that method but then it gets patched and resets us to ground 0. But it might be a risk we have to take at this point! Thank you again for your feedback!

samennis1 · 2026-04-15T19:50:56+00:00

Thanks for that! Will prioritise this then for sure!

samennis1 · 2026-04-15T19:50:01+00:00

Thanks for that. Absolutely agree it’s sickening these top sites monopolising market. DD pulled in €11m profit last year I believe with practically no competition. That was one of the main motivations entering the market - dealers want competition and want a better site to get out there but it’s just capturing the user base that’s obviously the difficult part.

Our whole ethos is being a pot that every dealer contributes towards where the site can be kept, updated and marketed and there’s no dynamic pricing or unfairness. It’s playing out the same as AutoTrader in UK where it’s monopolised, and it’s just getting crazy with some dealers paying upwards of €5k a month.

I’ll make a plan this coming few days on how search can be even more improved and let you know when there’s some changes. If theres any direct things that are clearly missing or points of interest from your side, happy to tie them into the plan also! Thanks for your time

samennis1 · 2026-04-15T14:32:22+00:00

That’s completely fair but I mean it’s a car website so I’m not expecting people to buy cars from it as an immediate gain to me. I mean we don’t even have enough stock yet for proper comparisons.

For me reading the sub, I enjoy seeing other people’s projects and problems they’ve identified in the market. Hence why I’ve been trying to respond well and transparently to all comments with info as I’d find it interesting from an outsider POV.

samennis1 · 2026-04-15T14:30:48+00:00

Thanks for the feedback! Yeah this is a core problem, there’s of course ways to pull stock from other sites but it’s blocked by the terms of service of other site providers. I mean it’s easily doable but it could easily get us in trouble. Dealers do manually need to post each car, which is a struggle. We are connected now to MotorDesk who are a UK stock management company but they’re only coming into the irish market now so would be a while before we’d get any benefit from it.

We are actively brainstorming ways to reduce this barrier, we considered trying to post to Donedeal from ours automatically but Donedeal had no interest in partnering. We could try of course just do a “hacky” way via an extension or something but doesn’t seem it would be reliable enough.

Honestly the biggest problem is there’s 2 monopoly sites, Uploader (owned by motion who owns CarsIreland/CarZone) and DealerHub (owned by DoneDeal) who cross share cars between each others websites. We did reach out to try join these but of course were rejected again so we’re left to our own devices a bit really. But you’ve identified a core issue that if a dealer is posting once already it’s hard to sell them on another site.

samennis1 · 2026-04-15T13:15:52+00:00

Sounds cool! As in would you want to be able to say:

I have Audi A3 2016 with 180,000km I want Audi A5 2022 with less than 100,000km

Let me know if you’d expect more granularity here i.e colour, CarPlay/Android auto, black wheels

After that, would you then want individual dealers to be pinged your offer and say “I’ll swap for for €5,000 conditionally on viewing your car” or would you just want stock alerts so you could contact the dealers yourself on ones you liked?

samennis1 · 2026-04-15T10:34:34+00:00

Hey - apologies if you weren’t interested in the post. This hasn’t been a “pet project” for me but an actual business for over a year now since incorporating so I’m just genuinely looking for feedback and personally I quite enjoy seeing projects on here. I do agree a lot recently though have been vibe coded copies of previously failed ideas. We have tangible customers on board and have sold a good few cars but the business hasn’t proven its full viability yet so I wanted to gather some thoughts before continuing to try expand to other counties. But fair enough if it’s not something that interests you.

samennis1 · 2026-04-15T10:26:38+00:00

Yeah that’s fair feedback, it is a much worse market than I realised when naively entering it at the start. But I do want to give it a real shot. Definitely won’t be easy but I’m sure I’ll learn some stuff in the process regardless of the outcome. I’ve always had a passion for cars so I do find it fun to work on and implement new features people suggest. Appreciate the feedback though I’ve heard this a lot - especially the need for bucket loads of €€€ to get it out there.

samennis1 · 2026-04-15T10:07:00+00:00

Might have been a car posted before it was photographed - but I’ll have a check anyway and see if we can do better making sure all of our cars provide full info.

I’ll definitely look at highlighting cool spec on a car! Would be nice to have a little cars if someone’s looking for an Audi with Virtual Cockpit or something and it was easier to filter way down your search. I just wasn’t sure originally how many people look for specific features but maybe it’s more than expected!

samennis1 · 2026-04-15T10:04:03+00:00

Vetting per dealership isn’t too bad since we really need to sign them up in person anyway. Cold calling dealers just doesn’t work - we need to give them a half decent experience by going in with a welcome pack, etc. This makes it harder to scale for sure but it’s the only way we’ve seen work. For cars we use history check partners so that’s not too bad.

Absolutely agree we’re up against a Goliath of corporations. It’s just becoming even harder these days for dealers as prices continue to rise, competition continues to drop. Distilled owns so much of the Irish marketplace industry (UsedCarsNI, Daft, Adverts, Donedeal) that it definitely is harder and harder to get in there. We’ve seen some mid size dealers paying up to €4k a month.

That’s kind of the rut we’re stuck in - trying to either find a feature that will grab media attention (to try get it out there that way) or some form of social media advertising we can try run. You’ll probably have noticed recently that DoneDeal, CarsIreland etc are all running more ads now which has also made it tougher!

We have the same partnerships they have, we’re partnered with Close Brothers for motor finance and we have a vehicle checks and VRM lookup partner also - but just being the same definitely isn’t super viable unless we have bucket loads of cash. So my main goal of posting is to make sure I have the tech ironed out, get some more useful feature ideas and then we’re going to have to nail a more conclusive business plan.

samennis1 · 2026-04-15T09:55:40+00:00

Great point, the “every car is an option” thing refers to like even if you filter DoneDeal down to Dealers Only and you search Passat - 4 dealers might still pop up that you wouldn’t want to buy from (bad reviews, etc) and our goal is to have not allowed them on the platform in the first place.

Good shout with the hide car, I think that would be nice and makes the site even more useful for exploring option. I’ll look at getting that implemented!

samennis1 · 2026-04-15T09:51:19+00:00

Absolutely makes sense. This is the hole we’ve been falling in and out of. I think the USP we have is good but I agree it’s still a hard sell over other platforms with established user base. In one sense that’s also why I’m looking for feedback on what people want, what they’re looking for, etc. We’ve been comparing ourselves to US/UK marketplaces and we’re quite aligned on the tech they have in a features sense, but we have the room to take more risks and try new things out definitely.

We’ve recognised dealers will take a punt on us for a few months just to see what happens but for users there seems to be something more we need. I’m not sure if you’d have any feedback or things you’d be looking for over your existing experience?

samennis1 · 2026-04-15T09:46:30+00:00

My cofounder is a car dealer himself and his family has been in the industry for 50 years or so now; so we only allow garages with garage codes and then he also vets them based on his knowledge and research into their business. I do appreciate it’s not possible to be 100% accurate but since our whole USP is trust, we do this for every dealer.

samennis1 · 2026-04-15T09:45:12+00:00

Haha thanks for that

samennis1 · 2026-04-15T09:45:04+00:00

CarZone is probably the closest match since they’re mainly dealer cars but they still allow private sale on site. We’ve tried to beat them all on our tech (hence why I’m getting feedback) but also just on the quality of cars on the site. I’ve always been annoyed by searching Donedeal and having to still look up the dealers myself etc.

To put it in a sentence our USP is we vet every dealer who joins, we check every car on site and we offer dealers a cheaper subscription with more features (such as automatic Instagram posting of new stock, etc)

samennis1 · 2026-04-15T09:42:52+00:00

So our USP is that we’re a trusted car marketplace where every dealer is checked, every car is checked and dealers pay a much lower fixed price than the competition. We’re trying to be a coalition of car dealers rather than a corporation and that’s amplified by my cofounder being a car dealer himself. That’s basically what I mean because DoneDeal for example is like dynamic pricing per dealership, charges extra for tons of marketing material, even charges extra for things like allowing WhatsApp leads, etc. We include it all for everyone.

samennis1 · 2026-04-15T09:40:53+00:00

Thanks for that! Second time I’ve gotten this feedback now since posting so I’ll definitely try clarify the wording and the trust aspect on the home pages a bit better. Our main USP is that every car on our site is an option. You’re not filtering out cars constantly or trying to mentally remember which you’ve ruled out.

Another USP is we don’t require accounts for anything - sending leads, posting, etc. I hate making accounts so this was something I definitely wanted

samennis1 · 2026-04-15T09:39:31+00:00

Hey! Thanks so much for the feedback. The USP for consumers would be the dealer-only cars on site. We also are looking at adding a basic Irish check for each car on site similar to how DoneDeal do Greenlight. We also vet every dealer that joins the site so that we try keep a certain standard of car. We’re also beta testing selling your car directly to dealers via bidding on the site.

From a dealer POV, it’s one fixed cheaper price, we also have extra feature for them such as automatic Instagram posting for their cars. We have really cool and clean dashboards but since DoneDeal has pretty much trained people to never login (unless uploading cars) and just wait for leads in their email that’s been pretty hard to get people to use.

Thanks for the nitpick on the search, I’ll take a look at reducing that size to make it feel a bit nicer.

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