car arbitrage app - is it worth pursuing

[harry020]

I was thinking of building an Autotrader and Gumtree scraper and then using that data to compare car prices to car buyers like Webuyanycar, CAZOO etc, to check if arbitrage opportunity exists.


The question is, is it worth building?

[QuickQuack]

Who is your target user?
What would be the benefits of using it for your target user?
Is there something that already caters for their needs?
If there is, can you substantially improve their experience?
How do you make money out of it/what benefit do you get?

[Hoofy]

Interesting questions above.

My initial thought is - if you're capable of doing this, why not take advantage of the arbitrage opp yourself?

[akirk]

yes if every item you are scraping for price is a precisely quantifiable item - i.e. all Ford Focus @ 10 years old are identical / perfect condition / etc.
but in reality they are not - so while your app might show 10 cars ranging from £10k - £12k and webuyanycar.com offers £11k -> ergo those under £11k have an opportunity to make a profit, but what is the reality of the car when it arrives at webuyanycar.com and they deduct £1,500 for not being in perfect condition, so your £11k sale is now £9.5k and you bought the car at £10k - oops.

It might be enough to identify likely options, and then you would need to view and buy based on the same principles WBAC would use - i.e. knock them down...

also a lot of sellers will have checked WBAC and decided they can make more on AT, so there is no opportunity for a profit...

[harry020]

this would be for personal use. I'm a newb to car dealing so not too sure if such opportunities exist.

[Hoofy]

harry020 said:

this would be for personal use. I'm a newb to car dealing so not too sure if such opportunities exist.

I think your best bet is to see if such opps exist!

1) See how much your car could be sold for on Autotrader (remember to knock off a % like any buyer would).
2) Then take your car to your local WBAC and see what they offer you. You will come away insulted.

Use the % differences as the guide for spotting potential deals on AT.

[fflump]

harry020 said:

I was thinking of building an Autotrader and Gumtree scraper and then using that data to compare car prices to car buyers like Webuyanycar, CAZOO etc, to check if arbitrage opportunity exists.


The question is, is it worth building?

IMO it would only work at a car-specific level. For cars where the numbers plate is visible in the pictures you could use ANPR plus other meta-data to see if it is underpriced vs WBAC/CAZOO offer. It would be a time consuming way of telling you that the market has become pretty efficient and there is next to zero arbitrage opportunity.

[daytona111r]

harry020 said:

I was thinking of building an Autotrader and Gumtree scraper and then using that data to compare car prices to car buyers like Webuyanycar, CAZOO etc, to check if arbitrage opportunity exists.


The question is, is it worth building?

Interesting idea as I love a good arb, but pointless imo as I don’t think you’ll find any realistic opportunities against the likes of WBAC who offer rock bottom prices and then try and chip you further down when they see the car.

[Truckosaurus]

Is there even an API (or similar interface) to get WBAC/Motorway prices in bulk?

(I suspect they also have rules about how many cars you can sell them, and how soon after buying a car you can sell it to them, to stop people 'trading' with them).

What you really need is something that searches card in newsagent's windows or the local paper as that's where you'll get the under priced cars - people paying to put ads on Autotrader will be savvy enough to have got a WBAC quote first.

[nikaiyo2]

Nah seems daft.

Firstly, anyone listing a car on any platform checks the WBAC etc price prior to listing, dont they? I cant imagine many who.

IF WBAC will pay £11k for the Golf you have found listed at £9K why is the owner not selling it to WBAC?

Does that not mean that the owner has already tried and been chipped by WBAC so listing it privately... for more than WBAC have offered.

Or do they know there are enough reasons for WBAC to chip the car to a lower price than thier initial offer.

[harry020]

For WBAC, there is an endpoint you can find by checking the network tab in Chrome Dev Tools. Someone mentioned Cazoo and the like require number plates that's correct. With GPT vision you can get the number plate via the API although its limited to 20 calls per 3 hours if i remember correctly, I am using my own vision model running on a private LLM to do this.

[georgeyboy12345]

You could do it as a hobby if you find that kind of thing fun/interesting, but I wouldn’t expect to make any profit out of it.

[Noluckhere]

I match bet so do this daily with sports.
It sounds like you have the technical knowledge so give it a whirl assuming the have the spare time, problem I see as has been mentioned- you will only have the buy price vs current market value it’ll still be a punt on what you can get shifting it.
A straight arb between purchase price and wbac would be improbable, there’s very few mugs around anymore