Miles Motors sells imported saloons, SUVs and pickups to Kenyan buyers — mostly mid-market families, mostly through referrals, increasingly through Facebook DMs. The dealership had a Wix site built in 2018, last updated in 2021, that listed eight cars while the actual yard held forty. Buyers were arriving asking about cars that had been sold three months earlier.
The problem
Three things were costing real money:
- The inventory was wrong. Eight cars on the site, forty in the yard. Buyers' time was being wasted; the dealership looked smaller than it was.
- Leads landed in three places. Facebook DMs, Instagram inbox, and a personal WhatsApp. Sales staff missed calls because they didn't know the lead existed.
- No way to take a holding deposit online. Serious buyers had to come in to pay a deposit, by which time another buyer had walked the car off the lot.
The brief
"Make the website match the yard. Stop us missing leads. And let serious buyers lock a car with KES 50,000 from their phone."
What we built
- Custom inventory site — searchable by make, model, year, transmission, fuel, price band. Mobile-first; 95% of the dealership's traffic is mobile.
- Lightweight CMS — sales staff add a car in 90 seconds: photos, price, condition notes, key spec. Sold cars are archived, not deleted, so SEO links don't 404.
- M-Pesa Daraja STK Push for holding deposits — KES 30,000–60,000 deposit per car, integrated with the dealership's existing Paybill. Receipts attach to the car automatically. See our Daraja integration guide.
- WhatsApp lead routing — every enquiry goes to a shared sales WhatsApp number with the car ID prefixed. Nobody misses a lead because everyone sees the same queue.
- Service-booking module — existing customers book a service slot online; the workshop schedule populates automatically.
- Performance budget — Core Web Vitals: LCP < 2.0s on 4G, CLS < 0.05. The site loads faster than the buyers' previous mental image of "yet another car-dealer Wix page."
The architecture (for the developers reading this)
Node.js server, SQLite (sufficient for a 200-car catalogue), Cloudflare in front for image delivery. Daraja STK Push with C2B confirmation fallback. WhatsApp Cloud API for outbound lead routing. Sitemap and Organization + Product JSON-LD baked into every car page so individual listings can rank on long-tail Google queries.
The timeline
- Days 1–2: brand audit, site map agreed, lead-routing logic defined with the sales team.
- Days 3–5: build inventory + CMS + WhatsApp routing. Train sales staff on the CMS (30 minutes).
- Days 6–7: Daraja sandbox build + go-live on the dealership's Paybill, content load (40 cars photographed and uploaded), DNS cutover.
The result
After 60 days:
- Qualified leads (a "qualified lead" is a real test-drive booking or deposit) up 220%. The mix shifted from Facebook randoms to website enquiries with car IDs attached.
- 94 holding deposits collected via M-Pesa in month one. Six of those were paid by buyers who had never set foot in the yard before.
- Zero "is this car still available?" calls from website leads. Inventory matches reality.
- Service bookings doubled. Existing customers stopped phoning for a slot — they booked online during the evening rush hour commute.
— Sales Manager, Miles Motors
What this build is worth, if you need something similar
A custom Kenyan dealer or service-business site with M-Pesa Daraja deposits, WhatsApp lead routing and a booking module is typically KES 180,000–260,000 — closer to KES 200,000 for a clean catalogue, more if the photos and copy need to be done from scratch. See our transparent 2026 web design pricing guide for what each tier buys.
Running a Kenyan business on Wix, Facebook DMs and missed phone calls?
We build sites that match your real inventory, take deposits from the customer's phone, and route every lead to one place your team actually checks.
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