South African company taking the fight to WeBuyCars’ front door

Weelee has broken ground on its newest megastore in Silver Lakes, Pretoria, which is situated right next to one of its biggest competitors – WeBuyCars. 

This is part of the company’s expansion plan, with it expecting to open up several additional megastores in the coming two years. 

It is not making any attempt to hide who it thinks its main competitor is, with existing Weelee megastores being located close to WeBuyCars “supermarkets” in Centurion and soon to be in Silver Lakes. 

Weelee is also mimicking the WeBuyCars playbook by pursuing scale and technology, which enables constant improvement regarding vehicle pricing when buying and selling.

WeBuyCars has been clear in its interactions with investors and analysts about the positive benefits of scale with regard to data to inform purchasing decisions and sales strategies. 

The company’s huge store of data enables it to expand margins and increase turnover across its network, resulting in greater cash generation, which can be used to further enhance its scale. 

Weelee’s latest megastore follows this strategy, with it having 20,000m² of showroom space and capacity for 1,000 vehicles in a single facility. 

This is on par with WeBuyCars’ latest supermarket, located in Lansdowne in Cape Town, which has space for 1,2000 vehicles indoors. 

The new Weelee megastore signals the beginning of the company’s aggressive national expansion plan, the company said in a statement.

Under this plan, Weelee aims to open additional large-scale megastores across South Africa in the next two years. 

“Weelee announces the start of construction on its next megastore facility in South Africa, a major milestone in our continued growth,” Weelee CEO Errol Levin said.

“This next Weelee development marks another step in the growth of a technology-driven megastore model that will help shape the future of the automotive marketplace in South Africa.”

The new megastore will have digital inspections, data-driven pricing, and be connected to Weelee’s online marketplace. 

Levin said that the company’s expansion will also promote healthy competition in the used-car market, ultimately delivering greater choice and improved pricing for South African consumers.

In a similar fashion to WeBuyCars, Weelee CTO Hennie Nel said the company collects and analyses vehicle data, which it then uses to enhance pricing across buying and selling. 

Not coming from nowhere

Weelee has only captured the imagination of South Africans with its large and bright green megastores in recent years. 

However, the company is nearly a decade old, having been founded by Marc Friedman in 2016. A year later, its buying and selling platform launched with the aim of fixing the “low-ball offer” problem in the used car market. 

Weelee has a different story to WeBuyCars, with it first focusing on the consumer-to-business segment of the used car market, 

Aiming to increase transparency and pricing for consumers selling their cars to a dealership platform, the company effectively launched an auction platform. 

On this platform, consumers would list their vehicle for sale via an online auction where thousands of pre-approved dealers would then bid against each other for the car. 

Weelee scaled relatively quickly despite the pandemic, with it having facilitated 100,000 sales by the end of 2023. That year, it doubled its sales volume at the same time WeBuyCars was shooting the lights out. 

The rapid growth of WeBuyCars and Weelee’s success saw the company pivot towards retail sales through the launch of megastores. 

This was largely driven by Levin, who transformed the company from purely online auctions to a physical retailer of used cars. 

In January 2023, the company launched its retail arm from a Kempton Park warehouse, with it pledging to sell cars at wholesale prices to the public. 

Later that year, Weelee launched its flagship Centurion megastore, which has room for 1,000 vehicles and has its own Plato. 

Weelee now operates on a hybrid model, with individuals able to auction their car to dealers or sell it directly to the company, which it can then sell at its megastores. 

Its new aggressive expansion plan aims to put it toe-to-toe with WeBuyCars, with it often being located close to its competitor. 

However, Weelee still has some way to go to catch the JSE-listed company, which now has 18 supermarkets and over 100 buying pods across South Africa. 

WeBuyCars is valued at over R15 billion on the JSE and trades over 14,000 cars every month. 

Coronation data shows that the company has been the fastest-growing JSE-listed business, growing organic revenue by nearly 30% on an annual basis from 2019 to 2025.