

How We Increased Conversions By 25% (Again) With Our Latest Redesign - myoung8
http://carwoo.com/blog/design-tips/

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tonystubblebine
CarWoo already gave me a refund, so I'm not saying this as a disgruntled
customer, just as an interested observer who happens to have tried the
product.

They should fix their product before they pay any attention to conversion.

I asked for a car with an MSRP of $13k and got two offers (so far) both way
above that price. The different price is because I was being offered a
different car than I requested, but the offer didn't include any information
about what the actual offered car was.

Here was the most outlandish example where the dealer claimed the sticker
price was $200k and that I was getting a 91% discount.
<http://imgur.com/99JcS?full>

I see three bugs, two major.

\- The dealer shouldn't be able to enter a sticker price that's 15x greater
than the requested price. (minor)

\- I should only see offers for cars that I would actually buy. This could be
done quite simply by requiring that the offer be within a small window above
or below the MSRP of my request. (major)

\- If the offer is clearly for a different car, as was obvious by the offer
price for both of the offers I've received, then the dealer should have to put
in as much information about the car he's actually offering as I had to put in
about the car I was requesting. (major)

I've contacted support a couple of times and the solution they say is coming
is a reputation system. I already know the reputation of the dealers: they're
scum. That's why I'm looking at services like CarWoo.

The way it is now just seems like the waste of an opportunity and of an
otherwise well designed system. I like the hipmunk philosophy: they know that
some flights are bad flights and just don't show them to you. I'd like to see
a hipmunk of for car deals and assume nobody is better positioned than these
guys. But they aren't there yet and aren't making noises like they even
realize that.

~~~
tommy_mcclung
Thanks for the feedback and I really appreciate you trying CarWoo! We only
improve by listening closely to feedback like this.

A couple things as a follow-up to this. Our model is new for dealers. Honesty
and transparency is a relatively new thing to this industry and no matter what
we do, there will always be a few bad apples. This is why a very solid
reputation system is important and over time will help address a lot of the
bad dealer issues. Not saying it will completely remove it, but it will go a
long way to help.

CarWoo! is a marketplace, much like any other marketplace, there are always
some sellers that have bad behavior and a few buyers end up running into those
sellers. I'm really sorry it was you, but hopefully you will leave some
reviews on the dealers you worked with so others are aware of the tactics that
were used.

About the $200k problem you saw... this was a first for us. But I guess we
should have expected it, dealers have used this tactic before CarWoo! came
around. They would throw out some bogus numbers to get buyers into their
store... classic tactic, we just didn't anticipate it and thousands of people
have used CarWoo! and this is the first time I've seen this one personally. It
is now fixed, we put some offer limits in on the dealer side as a direct
result of this case. Thank you for telling us about this.

Also another reason why the anonymity feature on CarWoo! is a great feature...
this dealer doesn't have a way to contact you now.

Hopefully we've fixed the issues you saw and I hope we did everything we could
via our customer happiness team to help. I'd be more than happy to let you try
CarWoo! again anytime for free. Just drop me a line.

Thanks again.

tommy at carwoo dot com

~~~
tonystubblebine
Thanks, the third CarWoo offer we got was human sounding and reasonable. Your
support has been very prompt through all this.

------
aresant
Excellent, and often overlooked point here - "We made the visual design look a
lot better in Internet Explorer."

If you look @ general consumer market a huge share are still on IE. What's
more striking for some of our clients is that an even huger share of BUYERS
are on IE.

EG - maybe 40% site traffic is IE, but 55% of their buyers are IE.

Lesson is don't build in the what-you-use echo chamber - analyze your customer
profile as it emerges and build for them.

------
jrockway
"When dealers compete, you win."

Isn't that a rip off of LendingTree.com's slogan, "When banks compete, you
win."?

~~~
mitko
lame artists copy, great artists steal.

