Carwale was founded in 2005. The company has three key platforms: Carwale, Bikewale, and Powerdrift (a video platform).
The company has 18.5m unique visitors (Carwale 14m+ and Bikewale 4m) and 65% of traffic is coming from mobile. Mobile traffic is growing 120% yoy. The company has reached 900m monthly page views. It has more than 3100 dealers on its platform, up from 500 dealers two years ago. According to management, the new car dealers are 280 and used car dealers are 3100 on its platform. A new car dealer spends on an average Rs2000 with Carwale. The revenue model includes a subscription-based model as well as pay per lead model. Conversion rate on leads is ~10% and pay per lead is US$3-4.
Carwale believes the used car market would be a big opportunity in India over the next few years: Its relationship with dealers would be key to sustaining/improving its market leadership position. It has started new services like certifying cars in order to build trust with the consumers.
In comparison to the horizontals like Quikr and OLX, a vertical-specific platform like Carwale has significantly better quality of leads. The company gets 79% of its traffic from direct and organic sources: 45% of leads come from mobile and conversion rates on mobile have been improving.
