Sandown Group is a Mercedes-Benz specialist and nothing else, with nine sites across the south of England and a name that has been tied to the marque for over forty years. When the group came to us it was mid-way through a change of agency, which is rarely the easiest moment to start a platform rebuild. It is also, as it turned out, the right one.
The brief was not simply a new website. It was to move both the website and the digital marketing forward at once, so that the group came out of the transition better positioned for how its customers actually behave rather than just tidier than before.
We asked the whole business, not just the marketing team
Before designing anything we ran research sessions with stakeholders from different parts of the business, deliberately in parallel rather than one after another. Talking to sales, marketing and operations at the same time surfaces the disagreements, and the disagreements are the useful part.
Two things came out of it clearly. The first was how much the legacy technology was holding the group back, and how much value was locked inside third-party systems that could not be reached. The second was that customers were not short of vehicles to look at, they were short of the information and structure needed to make a decision.
Find, reserve, drive
The platform we built is organised around three steps, and there are only three deliberately. Find the car, reserve it, drive it. Every screen has to justify itself against one of those, which is a useful constraint when everyone has a feature they would like to add.
Underneath, Sandown runs on the Autonomy core engine with a Nuxt front end. That combination is why the site can carry a custom look that belongs to Sandown rather than to a template, while still inheriting platform work as it lands. Green page speed metrics come from the same decision.
The integrations are the substance
A dealer platform is mostly judged on what it connects to, so it is worth naming them:
- Keyloop, where we work as an authorised partner, so the integration is built on a proper understanding of the products rather than on guesswork
- Cap HPI for the vehicle intelligence behind every listing
- Auto Imaging, part of CitNow, for marketing-ready imagery that stays consistent across nine sites
- Codeweavers for finance, chosen for its record in the trade
- BCA for part-exchange, with Autonomy logic layered on top so Sandown can set values against its own stock acquisition strategy rather than a generic figure
Alongside those, the AI content tooling we built into Autonomy lets the team generate vehicle descriptions on demand. Stock arrives, descriptions exist. That alone has saved the team hundreds of hours.
What actually changed
The honest answer is that the win here is operational rather than a single headline number. Automation across the third-party systems, plus the AI features, gave the digital team back the time they were spending on manual work. They now spend it on the things that generate revenue, and on evolving the site themselves against what the analytics tell them.
That is the outcome we care most about. A platform that a client's own team can drive is worth more than one that needs us every time something changes.
Read more about how the platform is put together, or book a demo if you would like to see it against your own stock.
