Transfercar Car Relocation

Project Background

An IT specialist with experience in the rental car industry noticed that car relocation is one of the largest cost components for any vehicle rental business. In fact, companies spend huge amounts of money on trucks and trains to move cars between branches.

This epiphany is how the IT specialist, Espen, got his idea to build a web service where travelers willing to follow the same route that rental companies use to transfer their cars could get a car free of charge. In return, rental car companies would pay considerably less for car relocation than they would pay to professional “car movers”.

Espen asked Sibers to help him refine an application that would allow travelers to see a list of cars available for relocation and a list of available destinations, along with relocation conditions. Rental car business owners could add new relocation destinations and select drivers from incoming requests.

Solution

First, Sibers tweaked the existing web-based application to represent the service’s availability in New Zealand. We also rebuilt the newsletter sign-up function, added new parameters for email notifications, renewed the registration and credit card request forms and password recovery process, and integrated a Flo2Cash payment system into the website. Moreover, our team created an interactive map and integrated it into the website so that information on destinations and the real-time number of cars available for relocation could be visualized.

Secondly, Sibers prepared an Australian version of the website for launch, while simultaneously rebuilding the system’s database architecture for seamless administration.

In the last stage we created the merge, in which sites on two different domains work off of the same code. At this moment, the new site for Australian travelers appeared.

Tech highlights

• PHP
• Symfony framework
• ORM: Doctrine
• DB: MySQL
• JS: Prototype and jQuery
• Pay: flo2cash.co.nz (SOAP service)
• Mails: send.smtp.com

Results

Today, Transfercar is a growing business with activity in New Zealand, Australia and the U.S. The company moves over 1,000 vehicles per month in New Zealand alone, bringing significant value to its founder. Rental car companies pay a fee to Transfercar and in return receive low-cost relocation services and thousands of potential drivers. Everything is facilitated via a beautiful, engaging, user-friendly web application that promotes a cheaper alternative to traditional car rental services, and plenty of adventure!