Improving the Car Buying Experience

Mandeep Patel UT-Austin Mechanical Engineering

Current Issue:

Car buyers have gotten used to looking up the features of a car on the manufactures website, and then switching to a third party site such as CarGurus to find a seller. Putting the two experiences side by side, you can see that its much easier to look at the features of a car on the manufacture's webpage. Its easy to scroll, and the manufacturer will take great care in being word efficient.

In contrast, the CarGurus interface has small pictures, and each dealer sprays the details of the car at you like a heavy storm.

Toyota offers no alternative to using CarGurus in order to easily find your vehicle. On their website, they require people to call each dealer and ask if the specific trim they want is available. CarGurus makes this easy as they list multiple vehicles and have different filters.

CarGurus:

Toyota:

Innovative Option:

Ford solves this issue by allowing customers to search all of their dealer’s inventories right on their site.

This actually works better than CarGurus as well, as the feature selector to the left is custom tailored for each car. Meaning that the Ford Fusion won’t have the option to specify by hard top or soft top-something the Mustang can do.

In addition, the customer gets to experience less harassment from different dealerships, as traditionally, you give your number out and wait for people to call you. This system allows you to contact the specific dealership with the specific car that you want.

Thus if you are a manufacturer, simply add the features that CarGurus like sites have that you don’t. Link all your dealerships to your website so customers can immediately search the local inventory.

If you are a third party site, add a common page that anyone can go to if they’re interested in a specific car-custom created to show off that vehicle’s features. Or add some features that other third party sites have like KBB’s ability to give a trade-in estimate.

The goal is to keep people on your site, and to provide them with all the info they need in one place. This keeps them engaged, and much more likely to go through with a purchase.

Thank you,

Mandeep Patel