CASE STUDY

Transforming Gumtree for a New Era of Marketplace Growth

Gumtree is one of the UK’s most popular online marketplaces, attracting more than 10 million monthly users who buy, sell, and connect within their local communities.

Following organisational changes, Gumtree needed to modernise its legacy CRM environment and implement a scalable platform capable of unifying operations and delivering a more connected customer experience.

By partnering with Trigg Digital, Gumtree successfully implemented a modern Salesforce platform designed to support complex marketplace operations while improving efficiency, scalability and future innovation.

INDUSTRY & SEGMENT

Retail Mid-Market

Platform & products

Agentforce Sales Agentforce Service Experience Cloud Slack

The Challenge

Gumtree faced several critical challenges as it embarked on its transformation programme.

Key challenges included:

A legacy Salesforce environment that required urgent modernisation following organisational changes
Disconnected processes and systems across Sales, Marketing, Finance and Customer Service
Integration limitations between Salesforce and core advertising platforms impacting media sales operations
Limited internal capacity to support and evolve the existing CRM platform
Tight delivery timelines to ensure a smooth transition with minimal business disruption
Data access and security constraints within the legacy environment

These constraints created a high-risk environment where the business needed to modernise rapidly while maintaining continuity across critical revenue and customer operations.

Our Approach

Trigg Digital partnered with Gumtree to design and implement a modern, scalable Salesforce architecture capable of supporting its next phase of marketplace growth.

Our approach included:

Architecture options assessment
Trigg developed three platform options — modernising the existing environment, an enhanced scalable architecture, and a best-practice future-state platform — enabling Gumtree to select the optimal balance of risk, speed and long-term scalability.

Customer 360 platform
Core functions across services, property, jobs, media sales, finance and customer support were unified into a single connected customer 360 platform, enabling consistent processes and a comprehensive customer view.

Modular, flexible architecture
A composable Salesforce architecture enabled Gumtree to accelerate the launch of new products and services while supporting future innovation.

Future-ready roadmap
The platform was designed to support advanced capabilities including revenue management optimisation, deeper workflow integrations, and AI-powered automation through Salesforce Agentforce.

In Their Words

“Trigg Digital’s deep marketplace expertise and proven Salesforce capability made them the clear choice. This new platform gives us the agility to innovate faster, streamline operations, and deliver a more connected customer experience.”

Andy Harper, Chief Executive Officer at Gumtree

The Results

IMPROVED OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCY

The new platform reduced manual processes by approximately 30–40%, streamlining workflows and improving productivity across teams.

STRONGER USER ADOPTION

Following go-live, the platform saw a 20–30% increase in active user adoption across core teams, driving greater collaboration and consistent ways of working.

75% LOWER COST TO OPERATE

Modernising the architecture reduced legacy technical debt, resulting in a 25–35% reduction in ongoing support and operational costs.

ACCELERATED TIME-TO-VALUE

The transformation was delivered rapidly, achieving legal cutover timelines and avoiding the need for an extended dual-run transition.