The advent of the internet brought changes to many American rituals. Remember holiday shopping before Cyber Monday? Remember CD’s? Classified ads? Stamps? Encyclopedias?

Why then, are most consumers buying a new car exactly like their fathers did 20 years ago, and their grandfathers did 20 years before that?

CarWoo.com is the first revolution in the auto retail space since the Monroney Sticker. Other websites may list cars and prices or charge dealers to access buyers’ info, but at the end of the day, the buyer will end up going through the entire negotiation process at the dealership. Before CarWoo.com, there was no way to go through an entire car purchase online.

Here’s how CarWoo! is different:

Car buyers are our customers. On every other online auto site, dealers are charged for access to buyers’ information while buyers can typically sign up for free. This creates counter-intuitive market, in which people who may not be ready to buy a new car for months, or at all, fill out a lead form to check out the market. Then dealers pay to spend time on customers who may not be ready.

With these sites, dealers are often disappointed to find that so few of their paid leads are actually ready to buy a car. And many buyers end up with a lot of emails and few actual quotes for their efforts (see Dave the Dealer’s venture into the online lead system for an example.)

With CarWoo!, buyers pay $49 for bids from local dealers, so CarWoo! dealers know that our buyers are actually interested in buying a new car. And dealers have no reason not to use the service to give an offer (it’s free!).

We provide the power of anonymity. Buyers who sign up for CarWoo! are only known to their dealer by their first name and last initial. No address, no phone number, no email. So I’d be Megan H. from San Francisco (and if I didn’t want dealers to know my gender, I could always sign up with a different first name).

This anonymity gives buyers the autonomy to negotiate from their home computers, without being pressured to come into the dealership before they’re ready. Buyers can negotiate as much or as little as they’d like (though buyers who negotiate more do tend to get better deals), and we even allow buyers to choose the dealers we reach out to on their behalf, listing dealers’ distance from the buyer and star rating to aid with selection.

We are creating a transparent marketplace. CarWoo! isn’t just a website, or a service for car buyers. We are an online marketplace. Buyers and dealers can come together on CarWoo! and negotiate everything that they would discuss in person, trim, options, trade-in, even financing terms. It’s a transparent marketplace because dealers can see what other dealers have offered each buyer and can lower their prices or offer additional incentives accordingly.

But since it’s online, car buyers can shop and communicate at their own convenience – no more weekends at dealership after dealership. CarWoo! is doing for car buying what Amazon did for holiday shopping – giving you your time and money back!