coches.net is an expert mobility marketplace and market leader in Spain. At the time of its integration with Stream, coches.net operated as part of Adevinta, alongside other major European marketplace apps, including Milanuncios and Fotocasa.
As a high-volume consumer marketplace, coches.net connects buyers and sellers at moments of high intent. Questions, negotiations, coordination, and decisions all happen in real time, making communication a critical part of the product experience.
For coches.net, chat isn't an add-on. It's the system that turns listings into revenue.
Why Chat Is Essential to Marketplaces
Marketplaces don't succeed on inventory alone. They succeed when buyers and sellers can move quickly from interest to conversation to action without friction or uncertainty.
In categories like used cars, chat enables:
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Buyers to ask detailed questions and verify information
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Sellers to manage multiple conversations at once
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Negotiation and coordination to happen instantly
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Transactions to stay on-platform rather than spilling into email or third-party apps
As marketplaces scale, chat becomes the transaction layer, the place where intent turns into outcomes.
The Challenge: When Internal Chat Stops Scaling
Before Stream, coches.net relied on legacy chat systems developed within the Adevinta group.
While these tools worked initially, once coches.net separated from Adevinta, it became clear that it would be impossible to fork the solution and maintain it in-house.
coches.net needed chat to:
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Be tightly linked to listings and user context
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Support a pure 1:1 buyer-seller model
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Handle high message volumes reliably
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Match and eventually exceed the feature set of existing internal tools
At the same time, cost efficiency mattered. At marketplace scale, paying for every registered user, regardless of whether they ever start a conversation, easily becomes unsustainable.
Most importantly, reliability was non-negotiable. When chat goes down, transactions stop.
Evaluating Chat Providers: What Marketplace Scale Exposed
To find the right long-term solution, coches.net ran a detailed proof of concept and commercial analysis, evaluating multiple chat providers including CometChat and other alternatives.
While some platforms offered basic messaging functionality, deeper evaluation revealed gaps that mattered at marketplace scale:
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Concerns about long-term scalability under high concurrency
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Missing or inflexible features critical to buyer-seller workflows
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API limitations uncovered during hands-on technical review
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Friction when resolving issues during evaluation
For the coches.net team, chat wasn't just about sending messages. It needed to behave like infrastructure, stable, extensible, and well-supported.
Stream stood out for its marketplace-ready APIs, flexibility, and the depth of developer support during the proof-of-concept phase.
The Solution: Stream Chat as Marketplace Infrastructure
Coches.net built its buyer-seller communication experience on Stream Chat, using 1:1 conversations as the foundation of the platform.
Each chat is directly tied to a listing, ensuring conversations always have context. This allows buyers and sellers to move seamlessly from browsing to conversation to coordination without losing momentum.
Marketplace-Focused Chat Features
Stream Chat enables coches.net to support the full buyer-seller journey inside the conversation:
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1:1 buyer-seller chat as the primary interaction model
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Attachments for sharing photos and documents critical to vehicle evaluation
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System messages to guide users through key moments such as reservations and feedback
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Pinned messages and information areas to surface important updates without interrupting conversation flow
From a buyer's perspective, chat feels simple and intuitive. From a seller's perspective, it functions more like a CRM inbox, managing multiple conversations at once.
Behind the scenes, Stream ensures messages are always delivered, even when users are offline, with consistently low latency across conversations.
Stream's global edge network connects buyers and sellers to the closest available server, ensuring fast message delivery and a responsive experience regardless of location.
This asymmetric usage shaped key product decisions, including disabling typing indicators and presence signals to avoid creating misleading expectations in seller workflows.
Reliability That Protects Transactions
At marketplace scale, reliability is inseparable from revenue. Coches.net relies on Stream to meet strict uptime expectations, ensuring buyer-seller conversations remain available at all times.
Even during peak listing activity and traffic spikes, chat performance remains consistent, with no degradation under load and no disruption to active transactions.
When chat goes down, transactions stop. With Stream, coches.net has confidence that its communication layer performs reliably when it matters most.
A Smooth Integration and DevEx
Replacing a deeply embedded chat system is never trivial. coches.net rebuilt a feature-rich messaging experience while improving scalability and maintainability.
The team was able to replace its internal chat tooling without slowing the broader product roadmap, moving from proof of concept to production in a short, predictable timeframe.
Stream's world-class DevEx supported the integration:
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Stream's APIs integrated smoothly with existing tools like SendGrid
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Developers had direct access to Stream's team through a dedicated Slack channel
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Questions were resolved quickly, with clear and practical guidance
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Performance and reliability were validated early during the proof of concept
Support quality became a deciding factor, not just responsiveness, but the ability to work through real-world marketplace complexity.
The Result: Chat That Powers the Marketplace
Today, Stream Chat is a core pillar of the coches.net platform.
All buyer-seller communication happens through 1:1 chat, keeping conversations on-platform rather than spilling into email or requiring parties to share personal contact information or use third-party messaging apps.
Conversations stay on-platform, coordination is centralized, and chat reliably supports the moments where purchase decisions are made.
Rather than treating chat as a feature to maintain, coches.net now has a foundation it can build on, confident that its communication layer can scale with the marketplace.
What's Next
As coches.net continues to evolve, chat remains the backbone of buyer-seller interaction. With a scalable real-time foundation in place, the team has the flexibility to expand how communication supports trust and decision-making over time.
For high-value purchases like used vehicles, coches.net is exploring how Stream's live video and audio can further enhance buyer confidence, enabling real-time walkthroughs, faster clarification, and more human interactions at critical decision points.
By building on Stream, coches.net gained not just a chat solution, but a long-term communication platform designed to evolve alongside marketplace realities.