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• Case | HBS Case Collection | March 2020

  Car Trade

  Rajiv Lal

  Vinay Sanghi, the founder and CEO of CarTrade, had been trying different business strategies to keep the company, which he founded in 2010 as an online marketplace for used and new cars, profitable and on track for growth. In a crowded and disorganized dealer marketplace in India, and an environment where consumers had gotten used to buying online, Sanghi had found that some big challenges were getting dealers to believe the validity of digital platforms to bring in customers, and for CarTrade itself to grow, get more margins from dealers, and get more advertising revenue from car manufacturers. Sanghi came from a world of brick-and-mortar retail and his family had run car dealerships, so he had started drawing on some of that history to build a franchising model, and acquire a large offline auctioner of vehicles in India. Plans were also underway to build an NBFC to lend to dealers and consumers. Would this be enough, and were these promising strategies? What would be the way forward for CarTrade, an e-marketplace, to build its margins, solidify its customer base and steer toward growth?

  Citation:

  Lal, Rajiv. "Car Trade." Harvard Business School Case 520-088, March 2020.  View Details

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• Case | HBS Case Collection | February 2020

  StockX: The Stock Market of Things

  Chiara Farronato, John J. Horton, Annelena Lobb and Julia Kelley

  Founded in 2015 by Dan Gilbert, Josh Luber, and Greg Schwartz, StockX was an online platform where users could buy and sell unworn luxury and limited-edition sneakers. Sneaker resale prices often fluctuated over time based on supply and demand, creating a robust secondary market that bore similarities to the stock market. Inspired by these similarities, StockX’s co-founders created a secondary platform that tracked sneaker resale prices over time and that emphasized authenticity, anonymity, and transparency. In 2017, StockX began to experiment with ways to expand from the secondary market into the primary market, using a new type of online auction known as an initial product offering (IPO). Based on the results of its first IPOs, was StockX on the right track with its strategy to expand into the primary market?

  Keywords: Markets; Auctions; Bids and Bidding; Demand and Consumers; Consumer Behavior; Data and Data Sets; Market Design; Market Platforms; Two-Sided Platforms; Multi-Sided Platforms; Market Transactions; Marketplace Matching; Supply and Industry; Analysis; Price; Product Marketing; Product Launch; Apparel and Accessories Industry; Fashion Industry; North and Central America; United States; Michigan; Detroit;

  Citation:

  Farronato, Chiara, John J. Horton, Annelena Lobb, and Julia Kelley. "StockX: The Stock Market of Things." Harvard Business School Case 620-062, February 2020.  View Details

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• Supplement | HBS Case Collection | February 2020

  StockX: The Stock Market of Things (Data Set)

  Chiara Farronato, John J. Horton, Annelena Lobb and Julia Kelley

  Citation:

  Farronato, Chiara, John J. Horton, Annelena Lobb, and Julia Kelley. "StockX: The Stock Market of Things (Data Set)." Harvard Business School Spreadsheet Supplement 620-711, February 2020.  View Details

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