A new Irish used-car site: CarList.ie. Feedback welcome.

CarList.ie

Hi,

I have just launched a new Irish second-hand car website and would love to hear your feedback:

http://www.carlist.ie/
http://www.carlist.ie/tour

The site is only a week old and already there are 400 cars for sale. I hope to have over 5,000 for sale by March.

There are lots of features planned, but I am really interested in hearing what features and improvements you would like to see on the site.

Thanks,
Gavin

Guy:Incognito

I can hear the sound of the natives getting restless.:)

If you can get the business , well and good. It'll be hard against established ones like carzone, CBG etc.

CarList.ie

Stekelly wrote: »

If you can get the business , well and good. It'll be hard against established ones like carzone, CBG etc.

It sure will be hard but I have a few tricks up my sleeve. I'm hoping that the simplicity and utility of the site is apparent when compared to the other sites. I have had a good reaction from the dealers so far, and I'm confident that I can quickly grow the number of cars for sale.

As far as I am aware, none of the existing sites can do this:

Map of BMWs for sale in Dublin

mike65

It'll proberbly end up with 90% of the stock that carzone lists, I like the use of googlemaps.

Mike.

quickstitch.ie

nicer feel to it than carzone alright, whatever makes it easier for the dealer to upload will probably be the key... the customer will do plenty of searching for irish car sites on the web, try google ad words maybe too to get yourself up there... I like the whatvan.ie website if thats any help for influence... easy interface.. +1 for the google maps addition...

ninty9er

One thing that Carzone and CBG are missing is the option to select a number of counties for search. (e.g 1 search for Cork, Kerry and Limerick) 1 thing I like about CBG is that it tells you how many of each car are for sale in the search dropdown.

If you could create a program for dealers on a gui that allows them to drag and drop photos and enter details into a set out excel/access type speadsheet save it and then upload I'd say they'd jump at it.

CarList.ie

quickstitch.ie wrote: »

the customer will do plenty of searching for irish car sites on the web, try google ad words maybe too to get yourself up there

I'll advertise on google once I have a few thousand cars for sale.

ninty9er wrote: »

One thing that Carzone and CBG are missing is the option to select a number of counties for search. (e.g 1 search for Cork, Kerry and Limerick) 1 thing I like about CBG is that it tells you how many of each car are for sale in the search dropdown.

Thanks for the suggestion, this is something I hope to add in a few months time.

ninty9er wrote: »

If you could create a program for dealers on a gui that allows them to drag and drop photos and enter details into a set out excel/access type speadsheet save it and then upload I'd say they'd jump at it.

I have a few tricks up my sleeve here too, they are just not quite ready yet.

Seth Brundle

I see a bubble near Ballybough with 13 cars for sale. CLicking it, I can only see 8.

Guy:Incognito

kbannon wrote: »

I see a bubble near Ballybough with 13 cars for sale. CLicking it, I can only see 8.

The bubble is bursting.

CarList.ie

kbannon wrote: »

I see a bubble near Ballybough with 13 cars for sale. CLicking it, I can only see 8.

It currently only shows the first eight matches in the bubble. I'll make improvements here soon.

barryfitz

picture quality of the cars i have viewed is pretty poor, is this because of the sellers camera, or the resolution restrictions youve set.

barryfitz

oh and best of luck with it

CarList.ie

barryfitz wrote: »

picture quality of the cars i have viewed is pretty poor, is this because of the sellers camera, or the resolution restrictions youve set.

This is due to the source of pictures unfortunately - they have already been scaled down. I need to do a little more work before allowing the sellers to upload their photos directly, a much higher resolution will be supported then.

barryfitz wrote: »

oh and best of luck with it

Thanks :-)

lafors

CarList.ie wrote: »

It sure will be hard but I have a few tricks up my sleeve. I'm hoping that the simplicity and utility of the site is apparent when compared to the other sites. I have had a good reaction from the dealers so far, and I'm confident that I can quickly grow the number of cars for sale.

As far as I am aware, none of the existing sites can do this:

Map of BMWs for sale in Dublin

You've just shown the car thieves where to rob the nicest cars
Best of luck with it, nice layout so far.
And I like the logo

Tipsy Mac

Best of luck with it, my first impressions, hopefully of some help to you,

The bad...
I'd for a start allow all dealers to put up cars for free for the next 6 months, I see you are offering 6 free dealer listings, this wont be enough, your site needs a couple of thousand cars to ever succeed, you will never get this amount by charging dealers to list when your site has not taken off. You should bite the bullet for 6 months and let everyone list for free, then as it becomes popular you can introduce payments for listings.
The font looks abit big and could do with being reduced.
You need to automate the login and setup process, providing just a mobile number gives the fly by night impression.
Incremental.ie site having "coming soon" gives the fly by night impression.


The good
Very nice idea on the google maps, and generally layed out well.

Suggestions
I would not allow anyone to list a car without photos, no photo no ad.
I would not allow any cars be listed without mileage and NCT (valid/expired) details listed for the car.
I think you should allow private sellers to list cars.
You could add a "cars added today" page where people could see anything new added withouth the need to trawl through the site.

CarList.ie

Tipsy Mac wrote: »

The bad...
I'd for a start allow all dealers to put up cars for free for the next 6 months, I see you are offering 6 free dealer listings, this wont be enough, your site needs a couple of thousand cars to ever succeed, you will never get this amount by charging dealers to list when your site has not taken off. You should bite the bullet for 6 months and let everyone list for free, then as it becomes popular you can introduce payments for listings.
The font looks abit big and could do with being reduced.
You need to automate the login and setup process, providing just a mobile number gives the fly by night impression.
Incremental.ie site having "coming soon" gives the fly by night impression.

Thanks for the feedback. I am actually giving the first 100 dealers a free 12 month subscription. The next 100 will get a free 6 month subscription. There are currently only 6 available slots, more will become available soon - this allows me to scale the site without having it crawl to a halt all of a sudden. I'll change the text to communicate this better soon.

The signup process is indeed automated, I can have a new dealer setup and listing their cars in 5 minutes. The mobile number is just a temporary point of contact for now, a dealer invite system will be activated soon.

Tipsy Mac wrote: »

The good
Very nice idea on the google maps, and generally layed out well.

Suggestions
I would not allow anyone to list a car without photos, no photo no ad.
I would not allow any cars be listed without mileage and NCT (valid/expired) details listed for the car.
I think you should allow private sellers to list cars.
You could add a "cars added today" page where people could see anything new added withouth the need to trawl through the site.

Thanks for these suggestions.

Private sellers will be able to list car in the near future. Once I have a few thousand cars for sale, I'll open it up to private sellers too. I am going to give away a thousand free-for-life private seller accounts on a first come first server basis - I'll post more on the blog when these are available.

http://blog.carlist.ie/

The 'cars added today' is most certainly something I want to add soon.

fletch

I don't see any way to filter by Year? Maybe I am missing it?
Also by engine size?
Would also like to be able to filter by mileage.
I also prefer to be able to manually enter values, rather than being restricted by a dropdown.

Like the "Your Starred Cars" and google maps although as mentioned before I would be apprehensive using it for fear of thieves targetting my car.

CarList.ie

fletch wrote: »

I don't see any way to filter by Year? Maybe I am missing it?
Also by engine size?
Would also like to be able to filter by mileage.
I also prefer to be able to manually enter values, rather than being restricted by a dropdown.

Like the "Your Starred Cars" and google maps although as mentioned before I would be apprehensive using it for fear of thieves targetting my car.

The year filter is currently not active, it will be soon though. In the mean time you can sort by year. There is currently no engine size filter nor mileage filter, I'll add these to my todo list .

The google map will be is opt-in - you wont't have to give a location if you don't want to. There will also be the option of using an area marker - this wont be pinpoint.

keefg

Just out of interest OP....you are going up against some established sites that have huge marketing budgets (very admirable BTW) and apart from a Google map I can't really see anything there to make you stand out from the crowd.

so what is your USP?

Seth Brundle

Not sure how they are added, but shouldn't there be an option of viewing the mileage in kms?
The [X] Hide link to hide the panel towards the top should possibly have an option to restore it. I clicked it and was then left wondering what was on it - I'm sure I won't be the only one and given that your contact details are on it, maybe provide a restore option.
In the address bar, if I replace the page number value in the querystring with text, I get an application error. Has SQL injection been catered for adequately?

Seth Brundle

Also, where are your company's details and data privacy policy as required by law?

Deliberator

Gavin, I wish you all the best with your website. You will not have to try very hard, in order to improve on the established sites, as I'm sure you have realized yourself. Your big task will be getting sellers and buyers to make use of your site.

I have always bought second hand, and I have been very dependent on the magazines and websites over the years. I have found though that most of these have been deteriorating considerably. The websites are poorly designed and the content is often out of date, or inaccurate. www.autotrader.ie must be the worst Irish site. It mixes UK car dealers in with the searches and the search engine has not been noticeably improved an a very long time.

I have been recently looking to the UK/NI for possible imports, so I've been using UK sites. www.autotrader.co.uk , by contrast, does not suffer in the same way as the Irish site, and the search engine I would consider to be the best currently available. I'd recommend that you play around on there for a bit, for some ideas. It does ask for a UK/NI postcode, but this is so they can give you the distance between you and the cars in the search results. I use the postcode of relatives living in the North, for convenience. You could use BT2 7AP, the postcode of the Europa Hotel, in Belfast or your own alternative...

CarList.ie

fletch wrote: »

I don't see any way to filter by Year?
Also by engine size?
Would also like to be able to filter by mileage.

I have added a year option to the filter. The engine size and mileage options will follow soon.

fletch wrote: »

I also prefer to be able to manually enter values, rather than being restricted by a dropdown.

I will consider adding support for this in the future - I am planning on adding an advanced filter option which would probably support this.

CarList.ie

keefg wrote: »

Just out of interest OP....you are going up against some established sites that have huge marketing budgets (very admirable BTW) and apart from a Google map I can't really see anything there to make you stand out from the crowd.

so what is your USP?

The current features that I believe are a big improvement on the competition are:

* Google Maps
* Quick List - click the star icon beside a car to add it to your shortlist
* Integrated filtering and results
* Simplicity
* No ads

http://www.carlist.ie/tour

There are lots of great features coming soon - one will be there later this evening which I'm sure you'll like . I'll post here again when it is live.

CarList.ie

kbannon wrote: »

Not sure how they are added, but shouldn't there be an option of viewing the mileage in kms?

Hover your mouse pointer over the mileage and you will see the kilometers.

kbannon wrote: »

The [X] Hide link to hide the panel towards the top should possibly have an option to restore it. I clicked it and was then left wondering what was on it - I'm sure I won't be the only one and given that your contact details are on it, maybe provide a restore option.

The same information is in the sidebar on the right.

kbannon wrote: »

In the address bar, if I replace the page number value in the querystring with text, I get an application error. Has SQL injection been catered for adequately?

SQL injection is indeed handled, the error handling could certainly be improved. I'll add this to my list.

CarList.ie

kbannon wrote: »

Also, where are your company's details and data privacy policy as required by law?

I've added the links to the footer:

http://www.carlist.ie/about (I'll improve this page soon)
http://www.carlist.ie/about/privacy
http://www.carlist.ie/about/terms

CarList.ie

Deliberator wrote: »

Gavin, I wish you all the best with your website. You will not have to try very hard, in order to improve on the established sites, as I'm sure you have realized yourself. Your big task will be getting sellers and buyers to make use of your site.

Thanks, I agree the that the big tasks are to get the sellers and buyers onto the site. I have created a site stats page which outlines my progress:

http://www.carlist.ie/about/stats

My immediate focus is on getting dealers to list their cars on the site. Once I hit 5,000 cars in Dublin, I'll start a marketing push for buyers.

Deliberator wrote: »

I have always bought second hand, and I have been very dependent on the magazines and websites over the years. I have found though that most of these have been deteriorating considerably. The websites are poorly designed and the content is often out of date, or inaccurate. www.autotrader.ie must be the worst Irish site. It mixes UK car dealers in with the searches and the search engine has not been noticeably improved an a very long time.

I have been recently looking to the UK/NI for possible imports, so I've been using UK sites. www.autotrader.co.uk , by contrast, does not suffer in the same way as the Irish site, and the search engine I would consider to be the best currently available. I'd recommend that you play around on there for a bit, for some ideas. It does ask for a UK/NI postcode, but this is so they can give you the distance between you and the cars in the search results. I use the postcode of relatives living in the North, for convenience. You could use BT2 7AP, the postcode of the Europa Hotel, in Belfast or your own alternative...

Thanks for the info, I'll spend some time using autotrader.co.uk.

CarList.ie

CarList.ie wrote: »

There are lots of great features coming soon - one will be there later this evening which I'm sure you'll like . I'll post here again when it is live.

I've just deployed a nice little feature for the result list:

When you hover over a car row you will now see a [+]. Click it to reveal some more details about the car. Click the [-] to hide these details.

The presentation of this will be refined over the next week.

Seth Brundle

Just looking at the dropdowns: if I select BMW I get the option for 3 series, 316, 318...
What is the point in 3 series if it is going to be model specific?

CarList.ie

kbannon wrote: »

Just looking at the dropdowns: if I select BMW I get the option for 3 series, 316, 318...
What is the point in 3 series if it is going to be model specific?

That will be fixed later this week- just the models will be listed as you suggest.

ninty9er

I do like the [+] thingy, you could even eliminate the need to navigate away from the search results altogether if only you could get the photos to work properly in conjunction with it

CarList.ie

ninty9er wrote: »

I do like the [+] thingy, you could even eliminate the need to navigate away from the search results altogether if only you could get the photos to work properly in conjunction with it

The photo slideshow will work with the [+] by this weekend.

ninty9er

CarList.ie wrote: »

The photo slideshow will work with the [+] by this weekend.

Then I'd suggest that you remove the [+] and just let a click on the car link do what it does now. Much better than having to hit the back button the whole time. Have you contacted you local enterprise board about grants....or a business planner?

Might sound useless, but they're well worth the money

CarList.ie

ninty9er wrote: »

Then I'd suggest that you remove the [+] and just let a click on the car link do what it does now. Much better than having to hit the back button the whole time. Have you contacted you local enterprise board about grants....or a business planner?

Might sound useless, but they're well worth the money

Thanks for the suggestion.

The [+] dropdown feature will show vehicle detail in a compact space by this weekend - it will take up much less space than it currently does. It won't replace the full vehicle view which has the photo browser, google map and contact the seller form (more features are coming soon too). I also need a full page for each vehicle so that Google can index in their search engine and so that people can link to vehicles.

I think that the [+] is a simple way to give users a choice in how they search for and view vehicles.

I'll look into discussing this project with my local enterprise board, thanks for the tip.

TheWaterboy

A good job and looks well.

One point i notice is that when you are changing Makes in the dropdown it takes a long time for the Model dropdown to reload - This should be instant. There are plenty of sites doing this method out there through JS or Ajax.

Like someone else mentioned i think the text is too big - Ive a 20" monitor and there are horizontal scrollbars - prob caused by your footer.

I think if you want to compete with the big boys you need to be better than them - provides something to the dealers that they dont provide. One complaint Ive heard about CBG from a dealer is that you can only upload new cars on one specific designated computer. If you build the correct admin for dealers that makes it easier and quicker to do this thankless job the ure on a winner.

Good luck with it

CarList.ie

TheWaterboy wrote: »

One point i notice is that when you are changing Makes in the dropdown it takes a long time for the Model dropdown to reload - This should be instant. There are plenty of sites doing this method out there through JS or Ajax.

I agree. I'll look into speeding this up, it it quite slow in IE. This should be instantaneous.

TheWaterboy wrote: »

Like someone else mentioned i think the text is too big - Ive a 20" monitor and there are horizontal scrollbars - prob caused by your footer.

The footer doesn't display correctly in IE and is causing the horizontal scrollbars. I reduced the size of the text in the vehicle list and filter bar a few days ago. Are there specific areas of text that you think are too big?

TheWaterboy wrote: »

I think if you want to compete with the big boys you need to be better than them - provides something to the dealers that they dont provide. One complaint Ive heard about CBG from a dealer is that you can only upload new cars on one specific designated computer. If you build the correct admin for dealers that makes it easier and quicker to do this thankless job the ure on a winner.

Good luck with it

I agree and am working on it . Thanks for your feedback.

CarList.ie

TheWaterboy wrote: »

One point i notice is that when you are changing Makes in the dropdown it takes a long time for the Model dropdown to reload - This should be instant.

I've fixed this problem. The Make -> Model selection is now instant:

www.carlist.ie/vehicles

TheWaterboy

CarList.ie wrote: »

I've fixed this problem. The Make -> Model selection is now instant:

www.carlist.ie/vehicles

yup that seems to work fine now.

One other simple thing - when a person clicks on the blog i suggest you open it in a new window. The last thing u want people to do throught a link is to actually leave ure site!

BnA

kbannon wrote: »

Just looking at the dropdowns: if I select BMW I get the option for 3 series, 316, 318...
What is the point in 3 series if it is going to be model specific?

I noticed this too with the BMW's. Did this happen because you allow dealers to manually type in the model if it's not there ? I would reccomend (like Autotrader.co.uk) to just go with 1 Series, 3 Series, 5 Series etc. The more choices you give people, the more likely they'll enter it wrong.

Someone else mentioned the Autotrader.co.uk search function as being excellent. I use it a lot too (dreaming) and I would largely agree but the one part of it that bugs the crap out of me is the selection of the year. Particularly for older cars.
The options are :
Up to 1 year old
Up to 3 years old
Up to 5 years old
Up to 7 years old
Up to 10 years old
More than 10 years old
But very often when looking for a car you are looking for a particular year because a new model or face lift came out that year and it can be hard to tie it down. I often end up having to do a text search for the year I want which is pretty crap.

The Carzone Year selection is much better. Just pick the year you want. Bang... no problem. But as the poster said above, the rest of the Autotrader search is excellent.

One final tip I'd give you. Unlike Carzone, make sure your server can take the traffic.

Best of luck.

CarLover

CarList,

This thread is a very good example of utilising resources to their maximum - Boardies being your very own outsourced software test team

It BeeMee

One little point : you use the proper "Š" for Škoda
But it means Skoda isn't included between Seat and SSangyong... instead it appears after Yamaha.

Now it's all very nice for aesthetics, but....

pontovic

Well done. I like it alot. Very simple to use, fresh and clean. I like when the photos pop up and the screen goes dark.

I hope you trounce carzone.ie, because in the 5 years I have been using that site they haven't done any work on it seemingly. The people who run that site strike me as deadweights who make money because they're the only ones who have a car dealer site in Ireland. Those who innovate and deliver something better should prosper, whereas those who procrastinate should flounder. I wish you the best of luck.

Well done.

Giblet

Seems ok, but the UI seems derivative of carzone. I know someone working on a new site which looks unbelievable and has great tools to help people find the cars they want.

BostonB

Personally I'd look for a car within 10~20 miles of where I live. That could be in any of about 4 counties Searching by counties only is very limiting IMO.

CarList.ie

FrankLavery wrote: »

You need to be able to copy ads from other sites as dealers don't like uploading more than once. Have you found a way to do this? Are you going to do it manually?

Yes, there are a few ways for a dealer to automatically add their vehicle data to the site.

JHMEG

Is it legal to copy ads from other sites?

CarList.ie

BostonB wrote: »

Personally I'd look for a car within 10~20 miles of where I live. That could be in any of about 4 counties Searching by counties only is very limiting IMO.

Thanks for the suggestion, I've just deployed this feature to the live site.

The 'County' dropdown now has entries such as '[Near Wicklow]' and '[Near Sligo]'. These will restrict the search to county and its surrounding counties. For example, searching for vehicles '[Near Offaly]' will search the following counties:

Roscommon, Westmeath, Kildare, Laois, Tipperary, Galway & Offaly.

CarList.ie

JHMEG wrote: »

Is it legal to copy ads from other sites?

It possibly would be, however I'm not copying ads from other sites.

CarList.ie

I'll soon be allowing private sellers to list their cars on www.carlist.ie. If you would like a free private seller account, you can signup here:

http://www.carlist.ie/sell

smash

CarList.ie wrote: »

It possibly would be, however I'm not copying ads from other sites.

really... ?

CarList.ie

steve06 wrote: »

really... ?

Yes, I have a number of tools which help a dealer upload their vehicle information to carlist.ie. None of these tools copy information from any portal website such as carzone.ie.

The vehicle data in your example is the same as it *is* the same vehicle from the same dealer.