Carbar was established in Melbourne in 2016 as an online vehicle marketplace. Shortly after, the founders noticed a trend developing overseas: subscription vehicles were moving from niche concept to mainstream business model. In Australia, however, nobody had caught on yet.

Carbar launched a subscription arm and this side of their business grew quickly.

“There are plenty of circumstances where people need access to a car regularly, but don’t need the financial burden or overheads of owning and running one. Or they own one car but need a second. Others use subscriptions to try out cars before buying them but see the benefits of subscription over ownership and stay with us,” explains Des Hang, who co-founded Carbar and is now its CEO.

Today subscriptions are the company’s core business and they offer their service to customers within 50 kilometres of Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane. Between June 2019 and the middle of 2020, Carbar enjoyed a 1000 percent increase in its active pool of subscribers.

But the exponential growth wouldn’t have been possible without the systems to support an idea that the market loved.

“As with many online businesses, we were challenged with system and platform integrations. We were looking for a partner and platform that would help us to build the foundations for future, scalable growth,” Hang recalls.

“While reviewing local and global solutions, it was clear that Zuora’s platform was in the best position to scale with our business. We’ve experienced some significant growth over the past 12 months and Zuora’s extensive API has allowed us to be agile and build new functionality that integrates with our platforms and processes and ultimately provides a better subscription experience for our customers. For example, with Zuora we’ve been able to reduce the time to subscribe from days to minutes!”

Says Hang, “The Workflow engine provided by Zuora is powerful enough to automate almost any process. By bringing consistency to the day-to-day operations of subscription billings and reporting, Carbar can focus on other vital business activities.”

Also: “Zuora’s agility has helped streamline our billing processes so we can work on pricing strategies and experiences that help attract and retain customers while maintaining billings and business expansion.”

According to Hang, “Zuora’s payment gateway support is quite extensive and we plan to broaden our payment options to support any method the customer chooses. With Zuora we can also create a new product and add that to our catalogue in minutes — whereas this used to take the development team days in coding time to develop.”

Carbar has ambitious plans for the future but so far Zuora has provided exactly what the company has needed. Concludes Hang, “We’re learning new things every day and look forward to continuing to improve our customers’ experience using Zuora.”