Summon – Reinventing the car selling experience

For decades there has been a void in the market for selling used cars. Sellers have had two (crappy) options; 1. Sell your car yourself privately (very time consuming and a lot of hassle), or 2. Sell your car to a dealer / trade-in (where you don't get a great price). We spotted this void and wanted to create an amazing alternative - something with the convenience of selling to a dealer, but the value of selling privately.

Our concierge service does all the hard work for the seller (including test-drives), and thanks to professional car photography and advertising we reach the right buyers and maximise the sale price. Summon is paid a commission of the final sale. We are a digital business. Unlike a car dealership we have no real estate (the car stays with the owner), and we pass these cost savings onto our customers. We don't even have an office, our team work 100% remotely.

Our customers are busy professionals (and often also busy parents), who don't have time to sell their car themselves. But it's unfair that they should have to take a 15% - 20% lower price for the convenience of selling to a dealer. Summon provides a solution. We take all the time and hassle out of selling, and also sell for a higher price than they could themselves (average 5% higher). As a start-up, we have invested in design to help differentiate ourselves from the 'Old Guard' traditional car dealerships - opting for a contemporary "D2C" style for our brand and visual ID.

Our investment in innovation and design is paying dividends with customer satisfaction. Our customers love us! We average 9.5/10 in customer satisfaction surveys, and 20% of our new customers are either repeat customers (i.e. selling a 2nd car) or referrals from happy customers. We are often asked "why has this never existed before?". The answer is that people filled the void with car-loving uncles and brothers selling cars informally for their family members - but nobody had professionalised and scaled-up a service like Summon is. We regularly run marketing experiments, to test new ideas. Two examples of this are: 1. During the Australian COVID lock-downs we created 'Dream Garage Zoom backgrounds' - free downloads to make your colleagues envious of your beautiful home studio and (naturally) your classic Ferrari in the background 2. Free PPSR Checks - a PPSR check is a requirement for anyone buying a used car privately (it checks if the car has been stolen etc), we have launched a 100% free service in competition with the paid alternatives, which provides a benefit to the user and also brand awareness for Summon