Ask HN: Why is the used car websites so much like 1999?

6 points·hyh1048576··4 comments

People still list on Craigslist, with dealers around. And it's incredibly hard to search on it. 3 years ago there was some "Show HN: Hipmunk for used cars" but the website is long dead. What caused this? What forbid nice and easy to use used-car-website to be build?

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Because, simply, it works... (from the business standpoint).

Craiglist has long been the envy of tech companies for having the highest revenue per employee by several orders of magnitude:

http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-annual-reven...

http://venturebeat.com/2012/08/02/stop-complaining-about-cra...

Craiglist, Gumtree etc. have large audiences so it's natural for people to advertise things for sale on them, even if their interfaces are not optimal for searchers.

If you build a competitor you have to build a usable audience of consumers and a decent inventory of products (and a good product). It's not as trivial as it seems at first glance.

I think momentum has a lot to do with it (sellers go there because the buyers go there and visa-versa); but also Craigslist (while old-looking) is fast and easy for anybody to understand. For those of us who grew up with classifieds newspaper ads, CL does not feel hard to search with at all...it's no frills but does the job.

I don't have personal experience with it, but this just launched: http://driveshift.com/

It seems to only be available in San Francisco right now, though.

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