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Photo credit: Carousell.

Remember when Carousell bought Caarly, a Singaporean startup that connects customers with used car dealerships? The fruit of this union is Carousell Motors, a standalone app to help buyers find the right car, choosing from 200 Singapore-based dealerships.

The Carousell Motors app sports more detailed product listings than Carousell, which usually features a product and seller name, a photo, and a price. “Serious car buyers want more information than that,” Carousell CEO Siu Rui Quek tells Tech in Asia.

The Caarly team brought their technical expertise and their deep knowledge of Singapore’s car market.

While the same listings will also appear on the core Carousell marketplace, the new app will let buyers search specifics like make and model, specific dealers, financing options, and car depreciation. Car seekers can also compare different car listings and use chat to get in touch with dealerships directly.

All this is made possible by Caarly’s team, which has fully transitioned into building Carousell Motors. “From Caarly’s point of view, we had a strong product, but we benefit from Carousell’s community and reach,” says Sanjay Shivkumar, formerly CEO of Caarly and now head of Carousell Motors.

The team brought on board their technical expertise and their deep knowledge of Singapore’s car market. Sanjay says the Carousell Motors platform now has over 10,000 car listings and is adding “thousands” more each month. He doesn’t offer a specific number.

Carousell Motors will be piloted in Singapore for now, helping the startup gather data and refine it before rolling it out in other markets.

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A separate app for car listings makes more sense for users, Siu Rui thinks. “With all products, we look at the data, talk to our community, and try out different ideas,” he says. In this case, user feedback told Carousell a dedicated app was the way to go.

Sanjay, who’s been through the experience of buying and selling a car on Carousell, says it’s all about optimizing the classifieds process for mobile. For example, users have now come to expect features like chat to contact businesses, and the same goes for dealerships who are learning to embrace it as a customer engagement tool. “It’s our job to train the industry to transact on mobile,” he points out.

Carousell Motors doesn’t mean the company will be launching a separate app for different types of products, unless it makes sense. “For most products, the standardized app has been a good experience. So far there hasn’t been a need to spin out separate apps,” Siu Rui says.

Carousell wants to cement its position in Southeast Asia’s mobile classifieds market. Photo credit: Carousell.

Battle plans

As Carousell has matured, it’s made several strategic moves to maintain a hold on its native Southeast Asia. It ushered in 2017 by acquiring Malaysia-based rival Duriana, which will bring its users and listings to Carousell’s marketplace.

It has also made key senior hires. Ex-PropertyGuru managing director Winnie Khoo came on board as general manager for Singapore and Malaysia. Rakesh Malani, formerly of Indian adtech firm Komli Media, came in as CFO. And more recently, veteran Silicon Valley engineer Jordan Dea-Mattson joined up as VP of engineering.

Their expertise, leadership skills, and networks will help cement Carousell’s position in the market, Siu Rui says. “The most material difference is that the [Carousell] founders can now get more sleep,” he laughs.

It’s all part of the startup identifying what it does best – in this case, online classifieds on mobile. This is what it hopes separates it from competitors like Shopee, a Tencent and Garena-backed mobile marketplace that claims annualized gross merchandise value (GMV) of US$1.8 billion.

See: Shopee may have overtaken Carousell as Southeast Asia’s top mobile shopping app

“In many ways we’ve doubled down on our mission – we are essentially a mobile classifieds system rather than a business-to-business-to-customer marketplace,” Siu Rui says to illustrate the difference. “We want to focus on our users and listings, find what resonates more with our community and what value we can bring to them.”

Other competitors are staking their claim in the region, including Hong Kong’s Swapit, a hyper-local mobile peer-to-peer marketplace that announced a GMV of US$200 million in January.

As of 2016, Carousell had over 57 million listings and over 23 million items sold in 19 major cities across seven countries. Siu Rui doesn’t reveal any other figures like Carousell’s GMV. Most recently, the startup raised US$35 million in a series B round last August, from investors including Rakuten Ventures, Sequoia India, Golden Gate Ventures, and 500 Startups.

This post Carousell has a new app for buying cars, doubles down on mobile classifieds with key hires appeared first on Tech in Asia.

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