Stacey Bradford wrote an article on Smart Money titled “Buy a Car Online for Less.”
The article has a simple premise: “The entire [online car buying] process is a lot more pleasant [than offline car buying]: No more wrestling with tough sales teams.” Continue reading
Last October, CarWoo! officially launched. In the year since, we’ve learned so much about what the marketplace meant for car dealers and car buyers. We’ve come to understand, even more, the challenges car buyers face when negotiating for the best deal on their new car. We’ve also learned about many issues that prevent car dealers and car buyers from engaging on an even playing field.
Today, we’re announcing a completely new side of the CarWoo! product that will enable dealers in the CarWoo! Marketplace not only to create the best possible experience for their customers, but also to turn “I’ll be back” customers into satisfied car buyers. CarWoo!’s freemium model debuts with Dealer Plus. Continue reading
We get a ton of questions from car buyers about how to get the best possible deal on CarWoo! Many people will do plenty of price research before they buy, and usually have a good idea of what price they’d be comfortable with and are just waiting for a dealer to Woo! them.
Here are some tips on how to use the wealth of CarWoo! features to your advantage as a car buyer: Continue reading
Optimizing websites is fascinating to me. It amazes me that assumptions are almost always wrong. I’m an engineer playing CEO so when I can make a hypothesis and then measure the results, I’m loving my work. So over the past few months I’ve been continuing our efforts on our site and working on different optimization theories. Here are two of the most interesting results… go ahead and copy the ideas… especially if you’re a competitor. You’ll always be a couple iterations behind us optimizing our site. (This tends to happen to us).
A few months back we talked about how we modified our homepage for site conversions. With our last redesign we increased our conversion rate more than 25% from our previous design. Continue reading
As you know, I spent a week with the Lancer Evolution as part of my car buying process. It was suggested by our Facebook Fans that I give the car a shot. It has plenty of power AND it has room in the back seat to fit two of my kids. I was lucky enough to get a car from Mitsubishi to use as my daily driver for a week. Here are my final thoughts and impressions of this car after using it for a week as I would if I owned it. Continue reading
I have the privilege of driving the Lancer Evolution for a week, courtesy of Mitsubishi who found out I was in market to buy a car and the Evo was on my potential purchase list. I’ve known about the Evo for a number of years as my co-founder Erik Landerholm owned one and then subsequently crashed it into a wall at Infineon. Continue reading
Tuesday I was scheduled to be on TV to talk about CarWoo! and the Ford news that came out that day. Essentially Ford stated they were going to grow by 50% in the coming years. A tall feat for a company that’s producing and selling 8M vehicles a year and is the number one auto manufacturer in the world. My commentary was going to focus on the unique perspective CarWoo! has from our marketplace data. Unfortunately the Chairman of the Federal Reserve ran long and my segment was canceled. Oh well, such is the life of a news story.
I had prepared some interesting insights to share, so here they are… minus my mug on TV. Here they are: Continue reading
Tommy is looking for a new car – go here for the background story.
Test drove a Chevy Traverse LTZ with a dealer from Putnam GMC/Chevrolet yesterday. I really didn’t know anything about the car before my test drive… I added it to the list because our Facebook fans suggested it and my wife said she thought it would work well for the family. Continue reading
About 6 weeks ago, Peter Chiu, Myril Shaw and I were coming back from San Francisco to our office in Burlingame from a meeting. If you know the area, we were coming down the hill heading south on 101 right next to Candlestick Park.
There was a little light mist (imagine that), but it didn’t affect road conditions at all. I was probably 500 yards behind a DirecTV truck, we were both cruising at about 60 MPH. All of a sudden the DirecTV truck slams on its brakes… luckily I don’t believe in tailgating and had plenty of time to stop. As I hit the brakes, I take a quick look in my rearview mirror and I remember thinking and saying outloud to the other two guys in the car “look out” and BAM! we were slammed into. Continue reading
We get this question a lot, so I thought it was appropriate to write a quick blog post to answer.
How far ahead of your purchase should you use CarWoo? There are several factors that you need to think about. When do you have time to actually go to the dealership to pick up your car? Weekday evening, weekend, morning, etc… How quickly do you need to buy your car? Do you have a long road trip planned, or do you need it first thing tomorrow morning? These things need to be considered as well as a few facts about CarWoo! Continue reading
If you don’t know, Yuri Milner and SV Angel just invested $150k in every YC startup in this class.