How We Increased Conversions By 25% (Again) With Our Latest Redesign
carwoo.comCarWoo 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.
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
Thanks, the third CarWoo offer we got was human sounding and reasonable. Your support has been very prompt through all this.
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.
"When dealers compete, you win."
Isn't that a rip off of LendingTree.com's slogan, "When banks compete, you win."?
lame artists copy, great artists steal.