pretty good, although for craigslist, there is really no sense in letting someone search within 14 days.
anything that's a good deal is gone almost right away
I lost out on like a dozen cars before I bought my last one. And that was only because I saw the ad get listed in the previous 5 minutes, and went right away to test drive it.
As far as feedback, 1 bug - when you scroll through the makes, it keeps hiding. Especially annoying if it's a brand at the bottom of the list(i.e. Mercedes).
Feature wise, the map of the car's location isn't that useful, much better would be to just list how many miles away the person is...and maybe even estimate the time to get there.(i.e. I remember thinking oh 30 miles, not that bad...then you spend 45 minutes driving to and from there, and pretty much your entire day is gone, just to see one car)
Yeah, this is totally true. I think we'll be adding a notification system with saved searches soon, but we wanted to see if anyone liked the idea at all first.
Also with the 14 days thing - we're trying to build something that can crawl dealership websites as well, and are hoping to have this going nationally sometime soon. The entire idea is that Autotrader sucks and basically raises the prices for everyone while presenting a shitty interface - for things as large and expensive as cars I think the internet could literally track all instances available, allowing a rational decision process behind purchasing sans prioritization of pre-existing distribution channels or advertising budgets
Before you do much crawling of car dealer websites, you should talk to the companies who build the sites. (Dealer.com/Vinsolutions..etc) They have systems in place that package up the car listings for their dealers and send them in csv/xml format to many sites like Autotrader/Cars.com on a daily basis.
no kidding?! That would make my life soooooooo much easier. If you have any contacts would be stoked to make the connection - my email is dw5ight@gmail.com, else I'll shoot them a line and see if anyone wants to talk to two guys in an apartment :P Thanks!
Comments
pretty good, although for craigslist, there is really no sense in letting someone search within 14 days.
anything that's a good deal is gone almost right away
I lost out on like a dozen cars before I bought my last one. And that was only because I saw the ad get listed in the previous 5 minutes, and went right away to test drive it.
As far as feedback, 1 bug - when you scroll through the makes, it keeps hiding. Especially annoying if it's a brand at the bottom of the list(i.e. Mercedes).
Feature wise, the map of the car's location isn't that useful, much better would be to just list how many miles away the person is...and maybe even estimate the time to get there.(i.e. I remember thinking oh 30 miles, not that bad...then you spend 45 minutes driving to and from there, and pretty much your entire day is gone, just to see one car)
Yeah, this is totally true. I think we'll be adding a notification system with saved searches soon, but we wanted to see if anyone liked the idea at all first.
Also with the 14 days thing - we're trying to build something that can crawl dealership websites as well, and are hoping to have this going nationally sometime soon. The entire idea is that Autotrader sucks and basically raises the prices for everyone while presenting a shitty interface - for things as large and expensive as cars I think the internet could literally track all instances available, allowing a rational decision process behind purchasing sans prioritization of pre-existing distribution channels or advertising budgets
Also will fix the make thing. Thanks!!!
Before you do much crawling of car dealer websites, you should talk to the companies who build the sites. (Dealer.com/Vinsolutions..etc) They have systems in place that package up the car listings for their dealers and send them in csv/xml format to many sites like Autotrader/Cars.com on a daily basis.
no kidding?! That would make my life soooooooo much easier. If you have any contacts would be stoked to make the connection - my email is dw5ight@gmail.com, else I'll shoot them a line and see if anyone wants to talk to two guys in an apartment :P Thanks!
no idea what kind of car you were looking, but my last experience I took 1.5 mo to find a decent one. and then negotiation took another couple weeks.
in all that time i was still "searching" craigslist, and I could see the same cars over and over. A few were fast, of course.
wasn't looking for a specific car, just wanted a good deal on a car that matched my criteria
ended up getting the car 30% below the KBB value
ah ok, you were looking for the killer deals.
I was just looking for any car in my budget that was in perfect shape. So, not unfair to pair almost the book value.