Conrad Strydom views and commentary from a web engineer

Looking for cars online and ruminations on wasted opportunities

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lancerrevolution/3710832872/

My mom is looking to buy a car, so I was asked to use my  superpowers of search and to find her a few candidates online. My only instructions: it must not be too small, it must not be to slow, it must cost less than R100k, it must not be ugly, it must not be chinese, it must be reliable, it must not be too old, and it musn't rust, ever. Right.

So off I went to my familiar port of call, namely autotrader.co.za and much to my surprise there was almost nothing of interest listed on there, useless. What now?! So I do a quick Google exercise and land up on Carfind.co.za.

Yuck! What an ugly site, this is like sooo old-school-not-web-two, don't think your rounded promo boxes with shaded backgrounds will fool me buddies! But you know what? There where real cars on there, I mean lots!

So off I went and added brazillions of cars to my shortlist. I was super stoked. Now what? So I visit my shortlist and lo and behold, I find that I can contact ALL of these dealers with a single form. Brilliant! Fantastic! Killer Feature!

Now to be honest, it was not all moonshine and roses. Nope, there was a field to enter my mobile number. Oh dear. You see, I have this irrational fear when it comes to handing out my mobile number to car dealers, weird huh? Happily it seemed that it was an optional field. But wait what's this? It's refusing to post the form, so in went my "mobile number" as 000000000. Right, disaster averted.

So at this point I was pretty happy, and was even more surprised to find that not only did I get sent a useful list of contact details for all the dealers via emails, my showroom request was also stored under my profile on the site. Quite clever this site, hey?

Anyhoo, that being done I refreshed my Inbox for the swift responses I was expected .. and there where none. But 10 minutes later there where. Imagine that.

I must say that this is probably a triumph for what we do in this (web) industry, I mean its really basic, there is nothing cutting edge or amazing here, it just works. It saved me a ton of phonecalls and I have had real results.

Now why the title of this piece? You see it's now 8 hours later and there are still some dealers that have not contacted me, why? I mean here is a solid sales lead, I did all the hard work for you, why can you not respond to me in a reasonable time frame? No, 24 hours is not reasonable, in fact I have already cancelled some viewings as other guys got there quicker. I get frustrated when we build these tools for people, they spend lots of money and then they drop the ball so heavily. Your tool which you pay for is only going to help you if you use it properly!

Now on another note, car sales guys listen up, learn to craft better emails, did you forget your job is to sell? Half the respondents forgot to tell me which company they are from and did not have a standard footer. Nearly ALL did not expand details on the vehicle, why? Do you realise there is only one crappy photo on carfind?

Kudos to David Carr from Barloworld Amstrong N1 City, he sent me a great email I was very impressed. He included a nice little sales pitch with the history of the vehicles (they are ex rentals in this case) and sent me 6 hi-res images from different angles, and had a complete mail footer with his name, title and contact details as well as the name of the dealership. That's what I expected from the others.

Remember, use it or lose it!