Trying to make used car buying more fair to the consumer

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While it is not really mentioned here too much my passion aside from building things and products is cars. I’ve also worked in the car industry for the past 9 years and I also have purchased cars from the consumer point of view. There are many points of interaction in a used car buying journey which are unfair but the one I am focusing on and trying to improve is classified websites. These are the problems at least in the UK (but it is probably the same elsewhere) with pretty much every classified website is a bias which goes against the consumer (there are none as far as I am aware that don’t fall into one of these categories).

  • They are mostly funded by car dealers which means:
    • They avoid saying anything bad about that dealer. We’ve taken a sample of over 2 million reviews in the UK from multiple sources and when its classified websites reviewing dealers most dealers are rated 4-5 out of 5. When checking other sources those ratings are much lower. For example there are many dealers that their average scores might be 1-2/5 and on classified websites they are listed as 5/5.
    • With prices one of the top classified websites in the UK rates them on a scale which seems honest. Until you find out that “good price” actually means it’s slightly overpriced and “fair” that it’s sigificantly over priced.
    • Car dealers have to raise their prices as the fees paid to the classified websites are insane. And some other dealers which have lower prices may not appear.
    • The design of the website has adverts placed above others if dealers paid for extra services which makes navigating and looking for what you want more difficult.
  • Some are funded by car brands and dealers:
    • So you get all of the above but they also tend to review cars of the brands that invest in them with much higher scores than the ones that don’t.

Many people have tried to setup new ways of selling cars but most have either fallen in this trap or mostly failed. So obviously… I thought let me try! So what I did:

  • Made the website sustainable even if it grew massively to be run by a very small team thus having very low overheads meaning we don’t have to go to dealers or brands to get money.
  • Gathered reviews from every single source.
  • Allowed users to compare any car (amazingly this has never been done before).
  • Allowed users to reverse search any car (they can put in a number plate of any car and then find out if it is a good deal even if it isn’t listed on the website).
  • Got revenue without going to any dealer or manufacturer.

You can check out what I did here.

Whether it works or not over time we’ll see but my hope is that it truely becomes (or already is) the most useful website and that it’ll spread via word of mouth. But currently it is doing very well on all metrics 🙂

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