Cars2Click’s journey to a future-proof data platform for automotive intelligence

The Overview.

Cars2Click partnered with Zitec to modernize and scale Cars2View, its AI-driven automotive data platform serving dealers, traders, and mobility companies across Europe. Together, the teams built a high-performance big data foundation capable of ingesting approximately 5 million car ads per day in under 30 minutes and processing up to 50 million events daily.

The result was a scalable, future-ready architecture that strengthened Cars2Click's ability to deliver faster, more accurate market intelligence to its partners across the European automotive market. Data processing time dropped from 2 hours to 10 minutes. Processing volume increased tenfold. And the platform was rebuilt to support the next stage of Cars2Click's growth, not only the current one.

The Market

The automotive industry is becoming increasingly data-driven. Dealers, traders, and automotive companies need timely, accurate, and actionable market insights to make better decisions about pricing, inventory, sales opportunities, and cross-border demand. In this environment, the ability to collect, process, and interpret large volumes of data is a business-critical capability.

Cars2Click understood early that a strong data foundation would be essential for scaling Cars2View and expanding its impact across the European automotive market. The platform needed to do more than work today. It needed to be ready for the data volumes, customer base, and analytics capabilities the company anticipated as the market matured.

The Challenges

Cars2Click's ambition required more than incremental improvements. The company needed an architecture capable of ingesting, processing, storing, and querying massive volumes of automotive data in a reliable and cost-efficient way.

• Ingestion at scale. Cars2View had to collect millions of car ads from multiple online sources across Europe every day. The process had to be fast, stable, and flexible enough to support continued growth as Cars2Click expanded to new markets.
• Processing speed. For Cars2Click's partners, data is valuable only when it is timely. A delayed insight can mean a missed pricing opportunity, a weaker inventory decision, or a slower response to market changes. The existing processing model needed to evolve to handle significantly higher volumes without compromising accuracy or performance.
• Architectural flexibility. Cars2Click needed a platform that could support modern development practices, reduce time-to-market, and allow teams to release improvements faster. The monolithic limitations of the existing setup needed to give way to a more scalable, cloud-native approach.
• Future-proofing. The target was a platform built for the next phase of growth, not only the current performance bottleneck.
• Scaling costs were too high with the existing hosting solution. Our solution allowed them to process massive amounts of data quickly, at a fraction of the cost, while requiring very little maintenance.
• The lack of infra control. To gain better control and scalability, we migrated their monolithic application to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and broke it down into microservices

The Solution

Zitec’s DevOps, Security and Cloud architecture consultancy teams worked with Cars2Click to define and implement a robust Azure-based architecture for Cars2View.

Key outcomes included:

• For large-scale ingestion, the team implemented a serverless architecture using chained Azure Functions and Azure Storage Queues. This approach allowed Cars2Click’s development team to focus on business logic and application code, while Azure handled the underlying infrastructure scalability. The result was a performant and cost-efficient ingestion setup capable of processing approximately 5 million ads per day in under 30 minutes.
• To improve data processing and analytics, Zitec optimized the ETL pipeline using Azure Tables, Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse Analytics and Azure Functions. Azure Synapse played a key role by enabling massive parallel processing, supporting large-scale analytics and creating a unified environment for data exploration, big data processing and machine learning tasks.
• Zitec also supported Cars2Click in adopting Azure Kubernetes Service as the main deployment environment. By migrating to AKS and splitting the monolithic application into microservices, the platform gained better resource allocation, faster scaling and improved operational flexibility.

This combination of serverless ingestion, optimized ETL pipelines, cloud-native deployment, and microservices architecture created a solid technical foundation for Cars2View’s next growth stage.