The dealer group's site looked like a car-buying website but behaved like a lead-capture form. Shoppers browsing across 18 lots could see a photo and a price, but nothing that let them evaluate a specific vehicle's actual condition, work out what their own car was worth against it, or understand what financing might look like before they committed to a call.

That gap pushed every serious shopper toward the phone. Nearly every visit that showed real buying intent ended in a form fill followed by days of phone tag with a salesperson, a process built for an era before shoppers expected to do more of the purchase themselves. Analytics confirmed the pattern was costing the group its youngest buyers, who abandoned at exactly the point the site asked them to call rather than continue online.

None of the underlying steps, checking condition, estimating a trade-in, starting financing, were things the site made impossible. They simply were not built into the online experience at all, which meant a shopper's only way to answer any of those questions was to stop browsing and start a phone conversation the site had given them no reason to trust would be quick.

We started with 16 interviews with recent buyers and mapped how a purchase actually unfolded offline, from first walking a lot to driving away, so the online journey could mirror steps shoppers already trusted rather than invent new ones. That mapping made clear where the site's gaps sat against a real purchase, not just against a generic ecommerce checklist.

The vehicle detail page became the anchor: a standardised 360-degree photography spec with condition annotations, so every one of the 18 lots' vehicles could be inspected online the way a shopper would inspect it in person. Around that page we built a step-tracked flow covering trade-in estimate, financing pre-qualification, deposit and delivery or pickup scheduling, so a shopper could move through the entire purchase without needing to call first.

Four rounds of prototype testing validated each step of the flow, from the 360 viewer through to deposit and scheduling, before any of it reached development, and the work handed off to engineering with a full Figma component library so the built product matched the tested design exactly, without a gap between prototype and production.