Accelerating Transactional Promote Growth in AutoGate
Context
Car dealers use the SaaS platform AutoGate to manage leads and inventory. AutoGate’s Promote feature used to boost inventory visibility on carsales.com.au was experiencing declining transactional revenue and a high 13% checkout abandonment rate.
Promote product
Promote contributes to two revenue streams:
Subscription revenue from ongoing Promote plans and pre-purchased bundles.
Transactional revenue from one‑off purchases made in AutoGate.
This project specifically focused on growing transactional revenue, addressing abandonment and discoverability issues in the Promote purchase flow.
Problem
Promote visibility limited to a single page within AutoGate.
13% of Promote checkout sessions did not complete.
Dealers lacked reminders or entry points once they left the Promote section.
Hypothesis
If dealers could discover Promote opportunities throughout the AutoGate experience and the cart followed them persistently, we will reduce drop‑offs and lift transactional Promote revenue.
My role
I owned the full product design process from discovery through rollout, collaborating closely with Product, Engineering, and Data teams as well as the Marketing team for GTM activities.
User interviews: Explored how and when dealers make Promote decisions in their daily inventory workflows.
Opportunity mapping: Identified high‑intent surfaces where promoting inventory makes contextual sense.
Design iteration: Created prototypes for modular placement patterns and a persistent cart experience.
Re-imagined header : Fully responsive overhaul of the header that combined support, news, and the new cart in a site-wide component.
Solution
New triggers across AutoGate: Promote is recommended and can be discovered from the dashboard, the inventory listing pages, and all Insights pages. All triggers invoke the same modular Promote panel.
Modular Promote panel: Deployable wherever vehicles are listed within AutoGate.
Persistent cart: Follows users across pages and sessions, maintaining awareness of pending transactions.
Scalable foundation: Designed so Promote components can later surface beyond AutoGate (e.g. carsales.com.au, dealer’s third party tools).
Outcomes
$2.7M in transactional Promote revenue (first 6 months)
Cart abandonment reduced from 13% → 4%.
+$200K incremental revenue from Promote being visible on additional pages.
Key learnings
Investing in reusability pays off: We spent more time upfront designing reusable modules. While this slowed early delivery, it enabled faster future rollouts and consistent experiences across products.
Tracking is non‑negotiable: Because analytics weren’t fully set up at launch, we were initially flying blind. Reliable tracking from day one is essential for iteration and confidence in measured outcomes.
Design for scalability: A modular, surface‑agnostic approach created a strong foundation for cross‑product monetisation initiatives.
Future improvements
From user interviews and internal feedback, several areas for improvement emerged:
Product clarity: Especially new users struggle to understand differences between the three Promote types and can’t easily compare the different benefits. They need to be able to make a definitive product decision.
Bundle management gaps: Unused Promote bundles can’t be allocated or tracked within the AutoGate app.
Account manager involvement: Many Key Account Managers give manual discounts and prefer controlling transactions directly, limiting dealer self‑service. Future work should include discount capability built into the transactional flow. We should also encourage more dealer‑driven self‑service behaviour, supported by pricing transparency and guided prompts.
Enhancing in‑app product education, bundle management, and flexible discount handling will reduce reliance on manual account support and build a more scalable Promote ecosystem.