Guaranteed Sale

In 60 seconds

• The problem: When a car doesn’t sell at auction, the dealer is stuck: relaunch it and hope, or take a loss. ACV had a better answer, a guaranteed payout, but almost no one used it.
• What I did: I owned it end to end as lead designer and lead researcher. I found out why dealers avoided it, put it where the decision actually happens, turned a days-long manual pricing process into minutes, and led a 12-person cross-functional team through launch.
• The result: 10× more guaranteed vehicles in under a year and ACV’s first white-label component system. In 2026 I took it further with ACV Offers: a guarantee before the car is even inspected.

The promise

A dealer picks a car and gets a guaranteed price. The car runs in ACV’s No Reserve Sale, open to bidders nationwide. If it sells for more, the dealer keeps all of it. If it sells for less, ACV pays the difference. No phone calls and no negotiating.

It’s a simple promise. Making it feel simple took a lot of work behind the scenes.

The problem

Everyone assumed dealers didn’t understand guaranteed sales, and that more education would fix it.

I interviewed 25+ dealers, and they told a different story. They understood it fine. The problem was timing. The offer lived in a separate flow, away from the moment a car failed to sell, and a price took one to two days. By then, most dealers had already relaunched.

So I mapped the whole life of a car in a dealer’s inventory, from the moment it’s imported to the moment it sells, to find every point where a guarantee could show up naturally. That map became the plan for the product.

The insight: don’t explain the option better. Put it where the decision already happens, and make the answer instant.

Three decisions that drove the outcome

1. Put the guarantee where the decision happens

Dealers manage their cars in one table, My Inventory. I built the guarantee right into it: every car shows its ACV estimate and its guaranteed price, with a clear status (Firm, Pending, or Unavailable). Dealers can select one car or twenty and choose, side by side, to send them to auction or take the guarantee.

Then one checkout to review every car and see a single number: the total guaranteed payout.

Result: 2% → 28% of unsold cars within 90 days, a 14× lift. It kept climbing to 32%.

2. Take pricing from days to minutes

Three specialists priced every car by hand: 4 to 8 hours each, with a 1 to 2 day wait. I led the effort to capture their judgment in a pricing model built on their past decisions and market data. When the model is confident, the price updates instantly. When it isn’t, the car goes to a specialist, and the dealer sees exactly where it stands. Offers expire after five days, so ACV never guarantees a price the market has moved past.

Result: 95% of cars priced automatically in under 5 minutes. The same specialists went from handling about 30 cars a week to overseeing 450+.

3. Design it once, reuse it everywhere

“Guaranteed” meant slightly different things on eight different ACV screens. I audited every place it appeared, including how each one showed disclosures and valuations. Then I ran three standardization workshops with design and engineering to agree on what should be shared and what should stay unique, wrote the design system guidelines, and partnered on the component build. The result was one set of building blocks (price, status, actions, and wording) that any team could reuse.

Result: Trade-in and retail designs estimated at 20+ weeks took under 10. The pattern became the design team’s standard and has been reused in 3 other products.

Chapter 2 · 2026

ACV Offers: a guarantee before the inspection

Guaranteed Sale worked, but it had a limit: a car had to be inspected and committed to wholesale before a dealer saw a guarantee. My research surfaced two kinds of dealers. Some want a guaranteed outcome. Others want speed and control and plan to set their own price. The old flow only served the first group, and only late in the process.

So I designed ACV Offers, which shipped in MyACV in 2026. I took it end to end: the pricing portal, the offers table in My Inventory, the offer page in MyACV, the flow for generating a condition disclosure, and the mobile versions of each, then stayed on through production to support the build.

A few design decisions made it work:

• Show the choice, then get out of the way. Before a dealer decides, the offer sits next to ACV’s wholesale and retail values. Once they accept, the offer leads and retail steps back, because the decision is made.
• One tracker for the whole journey. Guarantee, inspection, and sale in a single progress bar, so dealers never have to call to ask where a car stands.
• Every offer shows when it expires. It’s honest about how pricing works, and it gives dealers a reason to act.
• A “no” still has a next step. If a dealer declines, the design points them straight to a wholesale launch.

For the 2026 launch of the new ACV Guarantee, I designed the in-product onboarding guides with Marketing, audited the whole experience before the soft launch, and made the Guaranteed Sale performance dashboard easier to find from the inventory page.

What changed

• For dealers: a guaranteed floor on every car, with all the upside kept, and now an offer before the inspection.
• For ACV: Guaranteed Sale went from a niche offer to a real revenue driver. I led its expansion into trade-in and retail, and today it’s part of how ACV MAX prices a car: retail it, or wholesale it with a guarantee.
• For the team: pricing specialists moved from manual intake to managing risk and monitoring the pricing model.

"Guaranteed Sale used to feel like a separate thing. Now it's just the natural choice when an auction fails."

Dealer, after launch

What I took away

Big growth often comes from removing friction, not adding features. The product already existed. The path to it was the problem.

Now I always ask: where is the user in their decision when we show this? Making something available isn’t enough. It has to show up at the right moment.