Carxnow

The project

Carxnow is a door-to-door auto transport service operating across the United States since 2012. A customer hands over a car in one state and receives it in another, days later, having never met the driver.

It is a purchase almost nobody makes twice, and one where the thing being shipped is usually the second most valuable object the customer owns. The industry that grew around it is not known for transparency: quotes that change after booking, brokers who are not carriers, prices that depend on who is asking. That reputation is the real competitor. The product's job is to make a first-time buyer believe the number on the screen.

What we did

DForce provides end-to-end product and tech support.

• Instant quotes. Pricing appears in seconds from route and vehicle details, because the standard alternative - leave your phone number and wait for a callback - is where this category loses people.
• Transparent flat-rate pricing. The quoted price is the price. Removing the usual post-booking adjustment is a business decision, and the interface is built to make that commitment visible rather than to hide it in terms.
• A fully insured carrier flow, with insurance and carrier vetting presented as part of the booking rather than as a legal appendix.
• Live GPS tracking, so the days between pickup and delivery are not silent. For a high-anxiety shipment, silence is the problem.
• A single-page application that stays fast on every device, since a large share of the quote traffic arrives on a phone.

Engineering notes

• The quote is the product. Everything upstream of it exists to get the customer to a number, and everything downstream depends on that number staying true. Quote logic, booking and tracking are therefore built as one flow rather than three separate features.
• Nationwide routing. Pricing has to hold across any origin and destination pair in the continental United States, including the long, low-density routes where naive per-mile pricing breaks down.
• A conversion path with three steps and no dead ends. Quote, book, track. A customer who abandons at any step can resume without starting over.
• Trust signals placed where the doubt occurs, not collected on an "About" page nobody reads before paying.

Highlights

• A long-running product partnership for a service operating nationwide
• A conversion-focused flow built around instant quote, book, track
• Trust-first UX for a high-consideration, once-in-a-lifetime purchase

Services: Product, Design, Engineering.