Half an hour of paperwork, done in half a minute.

THE PROBLEM

Imports were a spreadsheet, a WhatsApp group, and 30 minutes of typing per car.

Buying inventory cross-border meant filling out the same regulatory forms by hand for every single unit. Thirty minutes per car. The team was burning the equivalent of two full-time roles on data entry — high-stakes (a typo could delay a shipment by a week), utterly mechanical.

Deal-sourcing was no easier. The team manually trawled three UK marketplaces for arbitrage opportunities, eyeballing margins from a spreadsheet refreshed once a week. By the time a profitable listing was spotted, half the time it had already gone.

And there was no end-to-end view of margin. Landed cost was a back-of-envelope calculation; resale price was a guess. Cars were bought on conviction and the books reconciled three weeks after dispatch.

WHAT WE BUILT FIRST

Platforms. Pipelines. Integrations.

• A daily-scraping pipeline across multiple UK marketplaces, feeding a normalised stocklist with image extraction, deep-scrape enrichment, and taxonomy-based clustering.

• A back-office dashboard for buyers — vehicle data lookups, vehicle history, the customs filing wizard, ferry / logistics booking, sales analytics, and a Slack-native bug tracker.

• A serverless backend wiring all of it together. ~25 functions in production, each owning a single step of the pipeline. Failure isolation by design.

WHAT WE ADDED ON TOP

The agents.

• A customs-filing agent — reads the buy-side data, validates against the relevant authority's schema, submits in under 30 seconds. Audit-trailed end to end.

• A pricing model — taxonomy-based ML predicts resale price and landed cost, refreshed nightly. Margins now visible the moment a listing is scraped, not three weeks later.

• A Slack alert agent — surfaces high-margin deals as they hit the market with a one-click 'interested' button that adds to the watchlist.

THE OUTCOME

The team got their week back.

Customs filing went from a thirty-minute manual chore to a sub-thirty-second submission. The two-FTE-equivalent of data entry vanished. The same headcount now processes meaningfully more units per week, with fewer rejections from the authorities.

Deal-sourcing is now real-time. The buyer's first action of the day is a Slack channel of overnight opportunities, ranked by predicted margin, sourced across multiple marketplaces. Time from listing to qualified alert: four minutes.

The platform has been live in production for months. The team focuses on the part of the business that grows it — buying decisions, supplier relationships, customer service. The plumbing runs itself.