Brothers Jan-Willem and Pieter (Japie) Seeder came up with the idea for their company in 2016 when they were looking for a used car themselves. ‘We discovered that, just like consumers, car dealerships were analysing the cars they had to buy manually and based on their value for money. We were convinced that there was a better way, and so JP.cars was born,’ Jan-Willem explains. Five years, later the company is supplying software which car dealerships can use to determine the prices and marketability of cars they want to buy and sell both quickly and accurately. ‘Our software means we can solve the challenges of emotion, time, and volume for car dealerships,’ adds Ronald Scholtus, who is responsible for marketing and sales at JP.cars. ‘If you have dozens of cars in stock, it’s impossible to check all of them manually every day. Having said that, you still want daily insight into how your stock is doing compared to the market.’ The technology provided by JP.cars enables you to do just that. ‘The same applies to procurement, certainly now there is a shortage of used cars. You have to analyse more cars and place more bids to achieve at least the same result. That too is impossible without help from technology.’ The algorithms created by JP.cars analyse many hundreds of thousands of cars at national and international level each day and select those cars which are interesting using customer-specific protocols, based on marketability and margin.
Real-time
By providing real-time insight into the market the JP.cars software always knows what the trend is in terms of current and future residual values and marketability. ‘This enables you to bid more on marketable cars than on unmarketable ones. Our data results directly in actions, and that has been proven to generate a greater return. Everyone is fishing in the same pond, so you want to be just that little bit faster than your competitor. If a car becomes more marketable, our algorithms automatically adapt the price accordingly. So, in a dynamic market, our software will immediately advise you to increase the price. For each of our customers, we’ve demonstrated that the turnover rate increases by 40 to 120%, that the age of the stock declines, and that the return increases. On top of this, an 80% time-saving can be achieved,’ adds Ronald.
So what happens if your competitor is also using JP.cars? ‘Our software is tailored to the specific wishes of the customer. A general car dealership will probably have a different strategy to a brand dealership. Even if everyone were to use JP.cars, there would still be diversity. The software does make for fewer relative price differences. Every car is unique and is weighted by such things as age, horsepower, options, and mileage. But the goal is to offer value for money: are you getting enough car for your money and enough money for your car?’ Ronald has another piece of urgent advice for the automotive industry: ‘Start managing cars based on value for money, so weigh up every option and every kilometre and base the price on that. This will result in a greater return than always trying to be one of the cheapest purely in terms of price.’
JP.cars is also looking abroad. ‘That’s what our customers want. We’re able and willing to be a reliable benchmark for the European automotive industry. This year we’re going to venture, for the first time, into our neighbouring countries, Belgium and Germany, and we intend to roll out our solution at an increasingly faster pace into the rest of Europe and America.