‘Buying and selling the right cars, at the right moment, and for the right price is a complex business. Whether a used car is or isn’t interesting depends on all kinds of variables. As far as our customers were concerned, this process was based primarily on experience and gut instinct. Although this is a good place to start, it represents only half the analysis. What you should want to add to this is real-time, independent and reliable data, such as online sales prices, price changes, days on the forecourt, and sales and stock numbers. The result is an optimal balance between sales price and return. Whether you’re successful therefore depends on the interplay between the expert’s knowledge and experience on the one hand, and the data that allows the expert to oversee the entire market in real time on the other. Together with our customers, we prove every day that this approach works,’ says Jan-Willem adds.

Great strides

Jan-Willem Seeder set up Japiecars with his brother Pieter six years ago. ‘Together with our customers, we’ve made great strides. The logical next step is international expansion. Our formula is simple: we provide automotive experts with complete transparency, based on reliable and independent information. We connect international markets with our state-of-the-art technology, built by the best software engineers and data scientists around. Every day, we determine reliable residual values, future residual values, and the marketability of used cars, and that’s the foundation of what we do. The information provided by JP.cars has to be usable and profitable on a daily basis.’

Transparent

‘We’re proud of the fact that these days more than half of the dealer top 20 in the Netherlands are customers of JP.cars. And that, for the first time, we also have customers abroad.

Our strategy for 2022 is also transparent and, on the one hand, involves the roll-out of the innovative fleet monitoring software to lease companies and financial institutions in the Netherlands – we developed this software in 2021 in cooperation with our launching customers. On the other hand, our strategy involves the continued roll-out of our market leading stock monitoring and procurement software to Dutch, Belgian, and German car dealerships,’ explains Ronald Scholtus, who is responsible for marketing and sales. He continues: ‘We’re able to grow quickly at national and international level because we’re using the latest technologies and a large number of retail companies, such as MediaMarkt, HelloFresh and Zalando, have already gained a lot of experience with the digital transformation which the automotive branch is now in the middle of. Incidentally, this is also one of the two reasons why we’ve changed our name to JP.cars because it underlines our international ambition. Having said that, we expect and hope that the name Japie will live on for a long time among our Dutch customers! It’s also a logical next step in our professionalisation.’ (PV)

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.