Dan Makovec’s blog

Selling Cars

Recently we launched our online Cars portal, and so far it’s been reasonably successful at attracting private sellers due to its relatively cheap pricing, array of payment options and seller features when compared with its competitors.  As with any new commercial site, we’ve faced a chicken and egg situation.  You need visitors to make a site attractive enough for sellers to advertise, but you need enough stock from sellers in order to attract visitors.

The powers that be, until recently, have been advocating an “organic” approach to developing the site’s business.  Indeed, “if you build it, they will come” has been a bit of a mantra around here since long before I joined.  Fortunately though, that has changed somewhat in recent months.  In one month, we’ve doubled the amount of stock advertised on the site, and we’ve started promoting the site via both traditional media and Google AdWords.

I wouldn’t say that traffic has shot up, but it’s increased steadily.Our analytics system tells us that users are spending more time on the site compared to before, and our sign-up rates have increased dramatically as I’ve made little tweaks to the system’s software to iron out kinks and bottlenecks.

As of today, we launched the first round of our dealers listings section - something which dramatically increases the attractiveness of the site to potential shoppers.  We’ve also outsourced the site’s look and feel re-design to some experts in the field (the current design has proven that I’m no HTML artist) to give it a more polished look and improve its SEO.   The redesign is coming along and we’re hoping to have it up in the next couple of weeks.

Also coming along is the part of the system that most excites me.  With the majority of the classifieds functionality live, we’re expanding Cars.com.au out to become Australia’s premier motoring portal.  We’ve got some partnerships with content providers signed up, and we’re working on the content management system at the moment.  I can’t say too much at the moment, but when that part of the site goes live, we’ll have a really useful motoring site ready for the Australian mass market unlike anything that’s out there at the moment.

Fun times ahead!