CarWoo is shutting down

I'm going to work on writing this up. Lots of reasons and it deserves a detailed post-mortem.

With Consumer Reports info I got 5% off MSRP. With CarWoo it was 10% off and a lot less work.

Oh wow, I wonder when and why they started using this design? If I saw this without already knowing about TrueCar I would have immediately closed the tab.

I had assumed they typo'd their link and I had clicked through to a squatter, and closed the tab. Only after seeing your comment did I realise it was correct and go back and look.

Those generic parked domain pages are heavily A/B tested and iterated to achieve maximum revenue per user.

What this tells me is TrueCar probably has a pretty solid layout that gets users to click and start the process.

I'm super confused by this (you're one of a few people to say it), because that page doesn't look spammy to me at all. A little corporate, maybe. The list of car links on the front page is workable as a UX.

Yeah, you're not wrong.

Its quite odd, and fascinating, because it has the info you'd want to see, give it a second or two, and it does look purposely designed. But, yes, it looks like a parked domain page. Or at the very least, hints at one.

I guess its one of those instances where no one sort of blinked and saw it how we are seeing it... if you know what I mean. Same sort of thing that happens when a song writer writes a song they genuinely thought was original, only to find out they has dragged up something from their subconscious that they heard before. I bet if at some point someone said, hey, that looks like a parked domain page the designers would have immediately seen it too.

You are making a lot of assumptions here.

It's not like TrueCar and Costco don't exist.

I'd gladly pay someone else to do that for me (assuming their commission falls below the cost savings they provide). I have zero tolerance for salespeople and their associated bullshit.

I have a fond memory of going with my roommate when he was buying a new car. He had a decent amount to give as a down payment. Armed with the knowledge of how much the dealer pays, he basically walked in, said he'd buy a certain car for a certain amount and not more and handed them his down payment check. The salesman took the offer to his manager. He returned with a counter offer. My roommate didn't budge. After three trips to talk to the manager (each time their offer came down), my roommate remained stuck in his price. On the last trip, their offer was just $500 higher than the desired price. Roommate still held his ground. We watched as the two men were discussing the check in hand. The salesman kept pointing at the check. We couldn't hear what they were saying but we knew it had to be along the lines of "He's going to buy a car. Give him the price he wants." The manager would not come down any lower. We walked out... just $500 away from closing the deal. And the best part... he got a call later that evening asking if he'd still be interested in the car at his desired price.

If you have the time and initiative (and can be willing to walk away without a car) you can get a good deal.

I think a lot of people here, myself included, are introverts.

Sitting in front of a salesperson who, if they aren't an extrovert are at the very least required to act like one, for a few hours while they see just how good of a deal they can make for themselves and their boss by talking sounds like a spot of hell.

It's only marginally better than being stuck to someone like that on a plane; at least when buying a car, you can walk out of the dealership.

The problem is that we are negotiating from a position of ignorance. You don't know the lowest price they will sell it to you for, you don't know the lowest price you can get from competitors, and so on. Let's say I decide I will pay $25K for the car, sit there for 3 hours, and get that price. How do I know that if I presented a competing offer I might get it for $24K? I don't, and thus I leave money on the table.

Because when you don't have that info, the dealer performs a simple calculus - how likely are you to walk away after 3 hours of haggling over $1000 that you didn't know was negotiable. The answer is probably pretty small, on average, and thus it is worth it to them to not go rock bottom on the price.

If I can pay a service to get that rock bottom price (where price + service charge < my negotiated price) why would I not want to use it?

I personally love the car-buying process. I've bought all my cars (both new and used) the exact same way:

* pre-select make, model, color, options, etc (this way I'm comparing apples to apples)

* find various examples meeting my criteria on the market from different dealers/private sellers

* get initial offers from all the dealers

* get financing in-place - either cash or an approved car loan from your bank

* Whichever dealer has the lowest price, call the rest and say "dealer X has beaten your price by $Y. I have cash in-hand and I'm ready to buy today. Can you go lower?"

* Depending on the answer, either cross that dealer off your list or update all the other dealers with the 'new' lowest price.

* Rinse and repeat until nobody goes any lower, then go buy your car.

Dealers hate that method, but it's saved me thousands of dollars with each car purchase regardless of new or used. Ignore all pleas for 'financing', 'what do you want your monthly payment to be', etc. You're going for the absolute lowest price you can wrangle. As far as time investment, outside of figuring out what make/model/options I want and securing financing from my bank (or getting cash), the 'rinse and repeat with the lowest offer' method has never taken me more than a weekend to implement.

I don't like the time it takes to get to their bottom line price. I only buy cars from private parties now. There's usually a little bit of negotiation but it typically takes about 5 minutes to get to an agreement... no mystery departures to a back room to talk to the "manager" etc.

I don't think buying a new car makes any sense anymore. At one time, when cars started to fall apart after 50,000 miles, it may have made more sense. Today, when with routine maintenance almost all new cars will go 200,000 miles or more with few major problems, it isn't a good deal. Let someone else take the depreciation hit.

Well as the article said, try http://www.truecar.com/ I guess. Being in Canada, I was hoping that CarWoo would do well and eventually move up north. The car purchasing experience is terrible, and is very ready for a disruption.

You can use a service like Costco:

http://www.costcoauto.com

In order to get the best deal, however, you will probably still need to haggle. You can use it as a starting point though.

If you're a USAA member, I know they have a car buying service to make things easy.

Things like this have been around from at least the late '90s, I've used them twice, in both cases it was my credit union that recommended a company. I'd ask some credit unions.

I've used carbargains in the past and it worked very well. The service is almost identical to CarWoo's but they have been around longer. http://www.checkbook.org/auto/carbarg.cfm

If you're planning to finance, TrueCar's whitelabel through PenFed Credit Union offers 0% financing for cars bought through them https://www.penfed.org/PenFed-Car-Buying-Service/?WT.ac=1242

I don't but they are an awesome team. I use to go to their Ruby meetups and they are so nice to the developer community. One of the guys showed a demo of how awesome VIM is and was compelling enough that I converted and I never looked back.

http://www.meetup.com/sfruby/venue/?sort=date&desc=1&venueId...

I started working at TrueCar last year on the SRE team, after my own startup failed to hit the moon. I'll be working with some former CarWoo employees I believe. TrueCar is good. I'd be very proud if I grew a startup to ~350 employees with $X revenue and it operated this well. The work environment is nice, the hiring bar is high, the product is the best available on the market, growth is essentially uncapped, and the CEO seems to actually know what he's doing. It most decidedly does not suck that our offices are right on the ocean, with a view of the Pacific.

Disclaimer: I do not speak on behalf of my employer or anyone else.

I've not bought from them, but they are teaming up with us (www.carvana.com) in the Atlanta area for used cars.

Their service is run by truecar.

TrueCar has a price that they evaluate the car at, and they give you a slip of paper that you can go into any TrueCar dealership and buy that car from them at.

With this method, sometimes the car dealership sells a car for lower than they were hoping with the local market, and sometimes they make a killing off the customer.

CarWoo, on the other hand, asks each dealer individually what they want to sell the car at, and then forwards that price to the user.

Troll much? Go back to 4chan.

The salesmen could be needed - because cars are commodities.

If a customer walks in your door, you really need to sell them on your brand of car, at your dealership.

If the dealerships were manufacturer owned, perhaps the commission would be lower and service level higher.

This. All dealerships should be converted to car delivery and ordering centers (with one of each model for test driving). The middle man cost should be wiped out, and the business should move to an order > build > x days to deliver approach. Save buyers $3,500 on a $30,000 car, let them further and easier customize, and they will wait for delivery.

Simply put, replace build car > sell car, with sell car > build car.

As it is, car salesmen are nothing more than order takers that generate a large commission and overhead; the customers come to you. They only still exist because of massive regulatory controls that have created a dealership cartel.

Auto makers would become significantly more profitable in this model as well, no more massive piles of inventory or huge mistakes in guessing which models will sell. This ancient, backwards model currently costs GM and Ford billions each year in lost profit, and costs consumers billions in unnecessary middle-man mark-up.

One of the world's most complex engineering challenges, filled with tens of thousands of highly engineered parts and tens of millions of lines of code, with per unit pricing ranging from $10k to $100k+, is a "commodity"?

The term "commodity" typically refers to products that feature little to no differentiation between each other. It means you could largely "throw a dart" to pick one, and you'd be no better or worse off than someone who does meticulous research.

That you say you won't buy another car until yours falls apart already suggests that perhaps you don't actually consider cars to be a commodity. Sure, you won't upgrade in order to get a faster or more luxurious car. But I'd imaging from your statement that reliability is probably important for you. Although you don't state it, if you frequently have family with you in the car, or even if you don't, there's a good chance safety is important as well. Cars from various manufacturers vary greatly in both these respects.

Not to mention that for other people, sportiness, luxuriousness, ruggedness, storage space, and other factors are important as well, and cars vary on those dimensions as well.

If the vehicle market qualifies as a commodity, so are the majority of markets of any sort, to the degree that the concept of a commodity adopts a useless definition.

Depending on your preference for engaging in negotiation and buying and selling, there is a pretty reasonable model to show you should buy a typical 3 year old used car and then sell it around year 5 or so thus buying a car when it is still reliable has past the fastest part of its depreciation curve and selling it when it's about to fall down the reliability curve and still worth close to what you paid for it.