Comment by mikeryan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikeryan | Hacker News Reader

I'm actually in the market for a new car and this sounds promising.

So I'm actually looking at this as a new consumer and a few notes on the experience (my first obviously)

1. The site is too wide. Annoyingly so, I don't know why I'm so put off by this but I literally have to widen my browser to get it to render correctly and it makes me uncomfortable. Considering how much empty space there is I'm not sure why its got to be over 1200px wide with no margins. YMMV I'm just one data point

2. I'm not comfortable with, what appears, to be the requirement to signup right away. I'm not clear on the process here, but I'd like to browse a bit without having to log in to anything. I also don't like not being to signup using facebook without having to give an email. Here's the thing car buying is one of those things where I hate giving out my contact info they tend to just be spam beacons. Let me do something without having to register my email address. I'd prefer to choose my car and options etc.

I'd honestly prefer to get to the point in the process where the only thing left to do is for me to pay you and you send my info to the dealers before I need to sign up.

3. Creating a log in without a password verification seems like a bad idea. What if I screw this up (or worse screw this and my email up)? By the way there's an issue with your reset password page. http://public.adifferentengine.com/files/badreset.png

4. I tried the car I want and I'm missing a bunch of option choices. I've got a pretty exact idea of the car that I want and there's a bunch of options that I can't choose. In my case I have a very exact idea of the car I want and I just want the lowest price from the dealers. Having to deal with negotiations based on price with varying options is a hassle I don't want to really deal with.

Anyway I'm not buying today but I'll probably give it a try "For Real" in the near future seems like something I'd want.

Mike, thanks for your feedback. I'll respond to each of your points:

1. We optimized for the majority of our users' browser resolutions. Your not the first to give us this feedback, though, and if we get enough of it we'll switch to a narrower layout.

2. Understandable. There are 3 issues here:

a) Trying CarWoo! before signing up: unfortunately, there just isn't a way to use the product without diving right in and getting in touch with dealers. When that happens we need a way to notify the user of what's happening within the app. Once we build features that have to do with research we won't require a signup to use them.

b) Spam: you are exactly right, giving your email address to a dealer is asking for spam. It's a big part of the reason we built CarWoo! The difference is that we actually prevent you from getting spammed because we serve as a proxy, relaying all dealers' emails to your email address and vice-versa. To do that, though, we need your email :)

We are very much anti-spam. The only emails you'll get from us have to do with your use of the application.

c) Changing the signup funnel to have contact info at the end. We split-tested different funnel variations (signup first, signup last, etc.) and what we've got right now simply converted best to paying customers. At the end of the day, that's what we have to make our decisions on, even though it might rub some people the wrong way.

3. Thanks for pointing out that issue, we'll fix it ASAP. Again, we split-tested it with email-verification and password-verification and what we've got now converts statistically significantly better (without a big increase in support requests for lost passwords or emails)

4. This is actually a big can of worms, but I'll try to explain briefly: manufacturers (Honda, Ford, GM, etc.) only build cars certain ways. Even if you can "configure" it on Edmunds or Cars.com a certain way, that doesn't mean that you can actually buy a car with those options.

Letting users check off options is actually a nightmare for the buyer and for dealers because it sets buyers' expectations too high at the start and makes it seem like dealers are uncooperative.

To further complicate things, manufacturers refuse to release build information and there's no easy way to get it from dealers. So were left with being able to determine builds on an ad-hoc basis.

Finally, not all dealers get the same builds, and some add what are called "Dealer-Installed Options." At the end of the day, even if you knew exactly what you wanted, there's no way to guarantee anyone has it or that everyone has it. The only way to find out is to ask. And CarWoo! makes asking incredibly easy and noncommital, plus you won't get spammed just for asking (and if you don't buy a car because it's not exactly what you wanted, then we always give you your money back).

At the end of the day, we decided to architect our solution so it works really well most of the time (a-la Pareto Principle). There will always be cases where it doesn't, but we're not trying to please everybody.

To wrap it all up, a lot of the things we've done don't work well for people who aren't ready to buy right now. But like I've mentioned elsewhere, we're not in the business (yet) of helping people figure out what kind of car to buy, we're in the business of making it really easy for them to negotiate with dealers.

Hope that helps. Feel free to email me at michael@carwoo.com if you've got further questions and let me know if you'd like a coupon when you do try CarWoo!

Are you sure you're going to keep that ! at the end of CarWoo? Like Yahoo!?

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