Poor advertising.

Henry Ford III

I was looking at www.carzone.ie last night and did a search on an Alfa 156 for some reason.

It came back with 234 cars for sale.

4 had no body description whatsoever. Lazy.

16 were described as hatchabcks (they were all saloons).

2 were described as SUV's.

1 was even described as an MPV!

Hugh_C

Henry Ford III wrote:

I was looking at www.carzone.ie last night and did a search on an Alfa 156 for some reason.

It came back with 234 cars for sale.

i think it's more to do with the laziness or stupidity of people who submit their cars and are too illiterate to fill out the forms correctly than the laziness or stupidity of carzone, to be fair. I don't think they particularly vet the submissions.

mikedragon32

I wouldn't buy a car from someone who couldn't even be ar$ed advertising it correctly. Their ignorace/laziness/stupidity would make me wonder how well they looked after the car during their ownership of it.

Henry Ford III

hughchal wrote:

i think it's more to do with the laziness or stupidity of people who submit their cars and are too illiterate to fill out the forms correctly than the laziness or stupidity of carzone, to be fair. I don't think they particularly vet the submissions.

Absolutely. It's not aimed at carzone, just some of their lazy/stupid customers.

Owen

Ever tried using the Carzone application? It's a pain. You've to go through your paper stock list, highlight the cars sold, highlight the cars recently traded in, highlight the price changes, mileage changes (after test drives), then go edit all of that info in the Carzone app. After that, for the cars you want to add, you must clean them, take photos inside and out, and then upload them. This is a 2 hour maybe 3 hour job if you're computer literate. If you're a one man garage, it could be all day if you're not used to computers. Hence the reason it takes a while and some people don't bother.

pclancy

Its weird because the obvious rule of advertising your product is get all the facts straight and emphasise the good sellings points, hence an easier and quicker sale hopefully. My car was advertised as a primera 1.6, manual with no more info on carzone. When I got their to look at it found it had e/w, e/m, sun roof, cd changer etc, features that would have made me much more interested instead of just dropping in for a look.

Doesnt make sense why people dont bother with details.

cargrouch

Hatchback/saloon mislabelling is wrecking my head at the moment as I specifically want a hatchback but I'm afraid I'll miss a good car if i specifically pick hatchback. And I still get saloons if I do.

In fact if you want a hatchback, you'll find em under coupe too (when the car in question is obviously just a boggo hatchback and not a coupe - Almera coupe anyone?)

The SUV stuff is really bad. Sports Utility Vehicle has been completely misunderstood, even by dealers, and applied to any vaguely sporty car. Although I'd struggle to define what exactly qualifies a car as an SUV, I certainly say an MR2 isn't!

I would be very sceptical about any dealer who gets these things wrong!

Eoin

pclancy wrote:

Its weird because the obvious rule of advertising your product is get all the facts straight and emphasise the good sellings points, hence an easier and quicker sale hopefully. My car was advertised as a primera 1.6, manual with no more info on carzone. When I got their to look at it found it had e/w, e/m, sun roof, cd changer etc, features that would have made me much more interested instead of just dropping in for a look.

Doesn't make sense why people dont bother with details.

Likewise, I nearly didn't go to view the car I bought as the guy didn't mention that it had cruise control, multi-function steering wheel, alloys (albeit yucky ones), air con etc. The pic he had up was crap as well. I ended up getting it, and I saw he had my old car advertised as an Alfa 156 1.8 (1700CC). It was actually a 1.6.

It's amazing how often the body type is incorrect as well.

If the carzone database was a definitive source, then they could remove options depending on the car selected, e.g. An Alfa 156 can only be a saloon and have an engine size of 1.6,1.8, 1.9, 2.0, 2.5 or 3.0 etc

Henry Ford III

156 can also be an Estate or Sportwagon, although these rare.

Eoin

Henry Ford III wrote:

156 can also be an Estate or Sportwagon, although these rare.

Oops, forgot about them - you get my idea though.

smash

You do know it's the advertiser that puts in those details, not carzone... Some dealers are just lazy and don't care.

Max_Damage

It's the same with eBay, vague descriptions and lack of photos, or photos of the car at obscure angles.

knifey_spoonie

As regard to incorrect information been give often the is a simnple reason, on our system the car are updated on our own website server asnd then copied onto carzone website, some times stuff just gets messed up in the system, also if we type in spec its lost when it goes to carzone.As to incorrect details thats just lazy, 99 percent of our cars go on tyhe internet with atleast 3 pic which are resized so they dont take a day to upload

smash

knife_fighter wrote:

As regard to incorrect information been give often the is a simnple reason, on our system the car are updated on our own website server asnd then copied onto carzone website, some times stuff just gets messed up in the system, also if we type in spec its lost when it goes to carzone.As to incorrect details thats just lazy, 99 percent of our cars go on tyhe internet with atleast 3 pic which are resized so they dont take a day to upload

Nice spelling there, you sure you didn't type it wrong........ haha

ned78 wrote:

Ever tried using the Carzone application? It's a pain. You've to go through your paper stock list, highlight the cars sold, highlight the cars recently traded in, highlight the price changes, mileage changes (after test drives), then go edit all of that info in the Carzone app. After that, for the cars you want to add, you must clean them, take photos inside and out, and then upload them. This is a 2 hour maybe 3 hour job if you're computer literate. If you're a one man garage, it could be all day if you're not used to computers. Hence the reason it takes a while and some people don't bother.

I agree, it should be psychic so you don't have to do anything manually. I mean jesus... having to actually work, what a nightmare!


I've emailed a few dealers asking about the spec of a car because they couldn't be arsed putting it in the ad, the response I get is "please call... bla bla" - I don't want to call, just type it correctly or just email me back and stop being lazy!

KTdesigner

I agree, I want software that knows what I want to do before I even know. And I want it to correct every thing that the users enter wrong. And I want it free. And I want it 2 years ago. If fact I want it to PAY ME, and do all my work, and sell my cars, and stop spam, and clean my kitchen. I want software with a nice smell that attracts women, and takes photos better than the best photographers (without the need for cameras), and after all this, I still won't be happy.

colm_mcm

Carzone software doesn't always work correctly. input details such as fuel type often come out incorrectly.

gyppo

Maybe this is slightly off-topic wrt the original post but here goes:

What about all the cars on carzone which are not accurately advertised?, - as in they are not what they say they are.
eg:

http://www.carzone.ie/usedcars/index.cfm?fuseaction=car&carID=467415

I'd be fairly pee'd off if I travelled to look at this car, and it advertised as a zetec - although its fairly obvious from the pic here that its not.

Another favourite looks like advertising the bhp figure to be greater than it actually is, eg advertising a tdi as 130bhp when in reality, when you go to view the car, you're told "Oh, thats a mistake, I dont know how that got there".

Yeah, right.

smash

gyppo wrote:

Maybe this is slightly off-topic wrt the original post but here goes:

What about all the cars on carzone which are not accurately advertised?, - as in they are not what they say they are.
eg:

http://www.carzone.ie/usedcars/index.cfm?fuseaction=car&carID=467415

I'd be fairly pee'd off if I travelled to look at this car, and it advertised as a zetec - although its fairly obvious from the pic here that its not.

Another favourite looks like advertising the bhp figure to be greater than it actually is, eg advertising a tdi as 130bhp when in reality, when you go to view the car, you're told "Oh, thats a mistake, I dont know how that got there".

Yeah, right.

It's all input by the advertiser, have a look at the software or look at the classified system.