1. Yup you sell someone's car
2. Probably, I need to sell my car within the next year and it's a hassle to put the pictures online, etc.
3. You guys handle the test drive.
4. Seems good to me.
I have a car I need to sell, I'm in the Bay Area. Sadly the car is back in Florida, I need to fly back and take the time to sell it. Major PITA, too bad you don't service South Florida ;)
Haha, yes it is a real thing, unfortunately only in the bay area for now. We've already sold a few cars and wanted to get some additional feedback. We'll push for Chicago soon!
1. Yep- you guys handle getting my car sold. Seems pretty straightforward.
2. Yes, definitely. When I moved to SF, I drove here from the east coast. After realizing that I didn't need my car and it was expensive to keep, I looked into getting rid of it. It was a 93 ford taurus, and from what I could tell, not worth too much more than the cost of getting it registered in CA and in shape to sell. I ended up donating it because I just wanted to get rid of it. Having someone sell it for me would definitely have been worth it.
3. Not having to spend the time and effort managing the car sale, finding a buyer, figuring out the price, etc.
4. Looks handy. Your recently sold cars are all much newer and nicer than mine was, though, so I'm curious if your service would have worked for my older vehicle.
On the slider which compares selling with Instamotor vs. trading with a dealership, I think you should consider changing "You earn" with "You save." It was confusing to me exactly what it represented.
Also, not sure if it matters too much, but generally framing things as "not-losing" is better than framing something as a gain.[1]
This is a very clean and straightforward website - no BS to wade through, no popups asking for my email, just straightforward here's-how-you-do-it. If I had seen this a couple months ago I would have definitely saved a couple thousand bucks.
One thing that's really inspiring about this is that it has the potential to completely change the concept of used car sales. Just like how realtors take you around to go see houses that are for sale, a car salesman can become a person who takes you around to test drive cars for sale.
I might be wrong about your target market, but it seems like it is currently a market of wealthy individuals with high-valued cars to sell but no time to sell them. However, the quickest sales are the ones for lower valued cars - way back when I only had four figures in the bank, my only requirement for my used car was that it not make weird noises.
One lucrative direction you could go with this in the future is adding financing options, so someone could lease a used car from you and you could pass a percentage of the monthly car payments on to the car owner. Or, you could buy the car from the owner and lease it out to potential owners. I have no idea what the legal requirements are to be able to do this, but if it works you'd have a pretty stable source of recurring income.
Overall it's a great idea, I wish you the best of luck with this!
primitivesuave - you have excellent insights, any experience in the car sales world? These are a lot of the same items that we've been exploring. I'd love to chat with you offline if you're available. Feel free to email me at val@instamotor.com if you're available or call text me at 510.761.5692
Should offer to detail the car as well (for a price), that can drastically increase the sale price. Perhaps you could find some mobile detail guys that you could contract out. Make it the gold package or something.
Ultimately, I want to know how much I could sell my car for before bothering to sign up.
Asking for a phone number made me close the page. People use the web because they want to do things on their time and not to have to deal with people calling them.
To be honest, the phone number made it seem like one of the millions of lead generation services (e.g. limos.com) where your information is forwarded to a bunch of companies who then all spam you and call you for weeks to come. Email should be enough.
1) Just looking at the site, without actually signing up, I can't really figure out what you do. I had to read through the comments here to understand what the service is.
2) I would be willing to pay several hundred to a thousand dollars, depending on what the car is and how difficult it is to sell.
3) Saving time and hassle is the biggest benefit for me.
4) Put more info on the site regarding what the service is, what benefits you provide, without having to sign up.
Having just spent several hours and a ~hundred dollars to find out a potential minivan is a lemon, I'd love to utilize something like this from the buyers' side. Do you have plans to address the other side of the market?
My personal feeling is the 5% is to high for luxury or expensive cars.
I have one right now that I will be selling (2012 Porsche) and my immediate reaction was a) I still have to prep and detail my car - I don't have to do that if I trade it in and b) 5% is to much. c) I don't want strangers driving my car. d) I don't want to be hassled with selling my car which is why I take the hit at the dealer. If you want to call it that.
Remember also that trade in deals are actually negotiable. Like anything else.
Also dealers actually typically try to slant a trade in toward giving you more money (so it gives you an incentive to buy thinking you are selling something valuable).
You might want to alter your % based on price. And also create a way of separating sellers of higher priced cars from more commodity vehicles.
I spent a lot of time in Vancouver, BC; Canada is a wonderful place and I can't wait until we expand there. We'll try to tackle the San Francisco Bay Area first :)
This might just work!
How much would it cost you to offer a free car-wash coupon that's redeemable at local full-service car washes?
I would write blog posts on interesting success stories with different types of cars and seller stories -- often cars are hard to sell for various reasons.
Offering to take a professional picture is your ultimate in.
Great idea! We've started soliciting quotes from out beta customers and have a ton of awesome data on car sales that we can use for blog posts. More coming soon!
This post got nailed–hard–by the voting ring detector, but I'm restoring it because we want to see original work on HN.
A "voting ring" is when people get friends to upvote their stuff. This is against the rules. We want stories to be on HN because they're good, not because they were promoted.
It's sadly common for a great Show HN post to get demoted because its creators, eager to get it on the front page, tried to game it. I've noticed a pattern, too: usually their gaming technique is pathetic. Perhaps that's because they're creators, not promoters. Unfortunately, it has the side-effect of making it certain that the ring detector will nail their otherwise good post, while we carry on the real cat-and-mouse game with people pushing crap.
I've got what I believe will be a sweet solution to this problem, but it awaits time for implementation.
Please everybody, don't ring-vote your posts; just take your chances with HN's randomness. If a post is solid and hasn't gotten any attention yet, a couple of reposts is ok. Be careful not to abuse that, though, since we penalize accounts for reposting too much.
I'm going to demote this comment as off-topic so it won't get in the way of the real discussion. Send any moderation questions to hn@ycombinator.com.
How does a voting ring look different than this scenario:
I email my friends (that read HN) about finally going "public." Because they are my friends and they've heard about my ideas and work for a while now, they up vote.
Excellent idea - we are all looking at it right now in our office. 1 person said he would definitely use this right now for his used car he is selling. Really well done, very well explained & designed.
Markets are pretty different across the US. Car buying/selling is local process. People tend to be willing to go roughly 50 miles to see a car if they're really serious about purchasing it. There are also differences in paperwork and requirements for selling a car, and how the market is made up. For example, from my experience, people in the midwest tend to finance their vehicles much more frequently than people on the west coast. It's not a huge deal, but does add additional wrinkles in the process.
It's a totally different business model to this but http://www.webuyanycar.com/ is a pretty big deal here in the UK. You get a valuation, take your car to them, they buy it. To my surprise it worked pretty well too and I got almost as much for my car as I'd have realistically got waiting for months on a classifieds site or whatever. I imagine the way the British used car market works has a big impact on the idea actually working though.
Yes, CarMax is sort of the model that we looked at. They are the only player in town that had the scale necessary to apply modern business management principals to their business. But they're margins are paper thin. Too much overhead.
I'm actually very impressed by it. They found a market that is highly fragmented and tried to consolidate. The interesting thing is that they it took them forever to make a profit (and tons of funding). It's great to see, but in my (biased) opinion, they didn't go far enough.
The downside, in California, is that the DMV still considers you to be the owner even after you sell your car to them. Some woman got a ticket because of this, although it was eventually dropped.
In California, CarMax and other dealers don’t need to register a purchased vehicle in the company name. So even with her release of liability, the DMV considered the former owner to the registered owner of the ticketed vehicle.
I don't think that makes any sense, that article says
"Fastrak admitted that it was a mistake to transfer the ticket back to the former owner."
I am pretty confident that California law is advanced enough to handle the case of selling a car to someone. Carmax doesn't have anything new in that realm.
Not just Craigslist, but we go through a lot of traditional channels (autotrader, cars.com). Selling a car is a marketing game, especially if you want to maximize your outcome. For certain types of cars, we also list them on specific forums (e.g. Porsches would get listed on Porsche enthusiast websites etc...)
Great service! A lot of people don't have experience or simply don't want to deal with the Craigslist experience. Putting another option between a private party sale and the dealer is great.
Questions that immediately come to mind - how do you handle negotiations, and how do buyers pay? How do you pay the seller afterward? (cash, verifying a cashier's check - other comments point out the common scams etc.) (Or is Instamotor just a transaction facilitator)? Where is the vehicle listed? Do you handle smog checks as well (for California)? <- Those are the most common things I go through the used vehicle process.
Also, how do you filter out non-serious buyers, especially for performance vehicles? A lot of sellers ask for some sort of proof of payment or cash ready before a test drive. It seems like you're mainly handling high-end cars where the 5% commission will pay off too, how does the model change for say a $5K vehicle?
Finally as a buy I would want to do my own inspection unless the inspection is at a mechanic I already trust - there is way too much conflict of interest having the selling side do an inspection.
Some ways to get it more buyer-friendly would be to offer a CARFAX as well.
> Also, how do you filter out non-serious buyers, especially for performance vehicles
I cannot emphasize the importance of this. I have a 2005 Lotus Elise that I would love to part with, but I'm really, really nervous about an inexperienced driver blowing the clutch or just coming over for a joyride.
I have had a lot of sports cars and test driven a good number as well. A lot of owners are like you and some wouldn't even let me drive the car, I had to sit in the passengers seat while they did everything. I could ask to do certain things like if they would brake check or accelerate, but that was the limit.
What I would propose is letting people ride with a trust local mechanic with the mechanic driving. That way they can make sure a professional is driving the car, can pick up on any issues, and can be honest with the potential buyer.
All of these are excellent questions. I'll tackle them 1 by 1 (the is to say, we're still working through some of these items, this is just our current methods).
1. How do we handle negotiations: We talk to you, the seller and work to find a fair market price for the car. We have dealership level tools available for this. We come to an agreement on the minimum price you'd take. From there, we negotiate with the potential buyer and can take an offer up to the minimum we agreed upon. Anything lower we'd need explicit permission from you.
2. The Buyer makes a cashiers check out directly to the the seller. We deliver it to them.
3. The vehicles are listed everywhere we can, including some of the traditional places like Cars.com and autotrader. For certain cars, we also do very specialized listings (e.g. for Porsches we list or Porsche enthusiast forums, etc...).
4. We handle it all, including smog checks.
5. We get paid at the time of the transaction usually directly with proceeds from the sale.
6. With performance vehicles we are very very diligent about this, currently doing it manually. We represent a few very high value Porsches. We research all of the buyers (again manually, but we'll work on that) to see if they're legitimate and also work to get commitments from them. If we see an 18YO kid that wants to test drive a Porsche, we won't necessarily disallow it, but we'll make sure that he has the financial resources and intent to purchase the vehicle. It's not perfect, we're still working on this, but I can tell you all of our owners have been very very happy with the people test driving so far.
--Edit--
We currently offer CarFax. One thing we have to improve is enumerating the depth of service that we provide.
1. 90% of questions asked about a car are standard (e.g. what's the history, what's the mechanical, is it a clean carfax). We can pre-empt this by having the answer ready.
2. For answers we don't have, it's the standard "let me get back to you" and ask the seller.
Be careful, forged cashiers checks are a common scam.
As seller to protect yourself you need to e.g. meet the buyer at his bank and get cash or a certified check that the bank prepares at that time. Or use some kind of insured escrow service.
Are there any better financial tools out there for this? Cashier's checks are almost free, but prone to fraud, wire transfers are bullet proof, but expensive.
Thanks AMS6110,
We actually verify all cashiers checks immediately when received. It's usually pretty easy to google the bank the check is from and call them to verify the authenticity of the check.
On point 1, have you considered innovating in the commission structure as well? If we've agreed on a fair market price, then I'd rather structure the commission along the lines of, for example, 25% of (sale price - 80% of fair market price). If you then sell the car for the fair market price, then you'd receive the same 5% commission, but you'd have much more incentive to drive a hard bargain.
This is great service! I think you can simplify the process further for buyers. Maybe you can schedule group of car viewings on weekend, say in parking lots of local mechanics (autozone, etc etc) . This way buyers won't have to schedule multiple views and sellers will have to part their cars only on weekends (similar to house viewings). Buyers then, if they choose too, can get the cars evaluated by local car mechanics.
One point - take a look at the copy on your pricing slider. 'You Earn' makes it sound like that's all I'm going to get out of this deal. It took me a second to realize it was the difference between the dealership and instamotor.
I did the exact same thing. I typically don't make "me too" replies, but I hope the extra data point is helpful in this case. Great idea, this looks like something I'd be interested in using sometime in the future.
Totally piggy backing on this comment. Don't usually make me too comments but this was something that had me scratching my head for a second. Otherwise looks great!
Thanks for the note. Yeah you're right. We'll make the update to clarify that. We had it as "saved" before, but that didn't seem to make sense. Still trying to find the right wording, but we'll update it today or over the weekend most likely. Thank you!
I paused when I read that too. In sales copy sometimes that extra friction can grab some attention as long as everyone comes to the correct conclusion after thinking about it.
The big "selling" point to me is: this is really easy -- and it won't cost you anything extra in time or money. In fact, you could end up getting more money for your car and with almost zero effort. Which, I think the copy does a good job of.
also: We charge < 5% of your vehicle's sale price, ~ 80% less than a dealership trade-in.
While I know what you are saying reading it quickly seems like you give 80% less than a dealer. That you are a worse deal. Might want to rephrases it just a bit.
I'm seconding the notion that 'earn' is cumbersome copy here.
I think something like "that's an extra x with InstaMotor" or "Make X more than the average" It's hard to restrict it down to just one word -- don't do it if you don't have to. I was very confused by earn at first.
You should really move the "Now Serving The Bay Area" message above the fold. I would have signed-up and used you right away (want to sell my Honda Element).
Hey Callmeed. Thanks for the note. We've actually debated this back and forth a little bit. Right now we (admittedly) have a ton of stuff on the front page, we didn't want to clutter it too much. We'll re-evalute this based on your suggestions and might make some updates today.
The sheer number of resources one dealership consumes boggles my mind: all the people, the mechanics, the land, the land, the land, oh, and the other acres of land.
Instead I am getting this error: Sorry, we're not able to save your info at this time. And the div with that error is added each time I submit the form so you can get them to start stacking on each other.
<div class="alert ng-isolate-scope alert-danger" ng-class=""alert-" + (type || "warning")" ng-repeat="alert in alerts" type="alert.type" close="closeAlert($index)">
<button ng-show="closeable" type="button" class="close" ng-click="close()">×</button>
<div ng-transclude=""><span class="ng-scope ng-binding">Sorry, we're not able to save your info at this time.</span></div>
</div>
Thanks Ryan, we just caught this too. We're restarting those servers. A little too much traffic for our lead system. We're working to get it back up asap.
Sorry it's been up and down all day. We didn't think we'd see quite this amount of positive response from the community. We really appreciate it and the feedback has been amazing. We'll make a lot of the changes suggested. If anyone wants to submit by can't please email me "val@instamotor.com" and I'll reach out.
I've bought and sold a lot of cars the past few years. I have never once considered a dealer trade in offer. I've had relatively easy and good luck with selling my car online through Craigslist and Autotrader which I imagine is what they will probably do to unload the cars.
I like the idea of the service but I'm wondering what the difference is between dealer trade in pricing and market pricing. Even if I have to sacrifice a couple grand to not have to do the whole process, I'm ok with that but I'd rather know pricing from that point of view.
I'm also curious how you plan on doing the legal paperwork as I've done a lot of this too and it's not easy getting setup to handle all the paperwork especially if it's between two parties.
You can generally post on Craiglist and get offers within a day that beat a trade-in offer. People sit on car listings and offer low-ball prices that are still above how awful dealer trade-in offers are.
I don't think selling a car is really that difficult of a process, for me anyway. I don't know what California paperwork is like, but in Ohio, all you need to do is sign your title over in front of a notary. Besides that, it's just a matter of listing it on Craiglist and scheduling times to look at it.
In California it's even easier than getting a notary - you just need signatures on the title ("pink slip"), and then both parties can fill an online form for transfer or liability. The buyer then goes and hands over the title to the DMV at some point in the next (10) days, getting a new title in the mail.
For as well me I've had a decent experience on Craigslist - just some due diligence and research on best practices and you're good to go. But it does take some time and patience and dealing with flaky buyers. Just ignore the lowballers and the non-serious. However I'm sure a lot of people would love this type of service, especially in common scenarios where the actual seller is busy so they try to proxy it to a family member who really isn't interested in selling it. Or when they've moved out of state and buyers don't want to deal with that
Dealer trade-in pricing generally uses a standard called "black book". They base the pricing on the type of car the the condition of the vehilce. The discount of retail to black book varies, but can be huge (4k+). When dealers buy a car off trade-in, they have to price in the fact that they have a lot of overhead to get the car sold. Dealers also price risk into the car value, if it's not a desirable car, they will sell it at auction. They have to make sure they stay under the auction value.
Individual buyers don't have that. That spread is pretty large and we can take advantage of that.
The paperwork is actually pretty straight forward if you have a notary public available (we do). We can pull up all the paperwork necessary and generally get it done at each persons convenience. The biggest issue is actually trust between the parties and us. That's what we have to work on.
I think Josh is trying to point out that comparing your price to a dealer trade-in price is a bit of a joke since trade-in price is always a 'low ball' based on market value.
I actually came in the thread to post the same thing because I saw that on your web site and chuckled.
It would also help to list prices you guys sold cars at, not just 'X' over 'trade-in' price.
The way numbers are presented and compared makes you look a bit sketchy to somebody who knows a thing or two about vehicles.
I like it and would like to use it here in D.C. please.
I would suggest making the sell price in the big red letters instead of the "youll earn" part. That whole section is a little confusing and I thought it was telling me I would only get 2k for my 20k car. I only really care about how much I would be getting for my car, the comparison to the dealership is important but secondary, and oh by the way I will have already probably looked that up on kbb.com.
Thanks for the feedback. We are focusing on the bay area for now but are looking forward to expanding. As far as the wording goes, we've gotten several comments about it and will be changing it soon.
Could you please add a form for "Notify me when InstaMotor is available in my area"? Just with email and city. I almost signed up before I saw it was only available for the Bay area.
Hi Darren -- I agree with you. I will go ahead and fix it. We are still on the fence as to what is the right amount to charge for our service, but less than 5% is the goal.
214 comments
[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 282 ms ] threadWe’d love to get some additional feedback on the service. Any feedback provided is super beneficial. We’re specifically looking for some feedback on:
1. When you get to the site, within the first 30 seconds, do you understand what we do. Why or why not?
2. If you do understand what we do, would you ever use a service like this? How much would you be willing to pay for this service?
3. What’s the biggest benefit to the service that you see?
4. Any general feedback on the site the content, the service as a whole would be great.
Thanks for the help guys, We always appreciate it!
Was thinking about selling it for 3 months already but just takes so much time.
Haha, yes it is a real thing, unfortunately only in the bay area for now. We've already sold a few cars and wanted to get some additional feedback. We'll push for Chicago soon!
2. Yes, definitely. When I moved to SF, I drove here from the east coast. After realizing that I didn't need my car and it was expensive to keep, I looked into getting rid of it. It was a 93 ford taurus, and from what I could tell, not worth too much more than the cost of getting it registered in CA and in shape to sell. I ended up donating it because I just wanted to get rid of it. Having someone sell it for me would definitely have been worth it.
3. Not having to spend the time and effort managing the car sale, finding a buyer, figuring out the price, etc.
4. Looks handy. Your recently sold cars are all much newer and nicer than mine was, though, so I'm curious if your service would have worked for my older vehicle.
I just did the same thing for similar reasons. If there was no hassle for me, I would've sold it. 2 months too late!
Also, not sure if it matters too much, but generally framing things as "not-losing" is better than framing something as a gain.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion
One thing that's really inspiring about this is that it has the potential to completely change the concept of used car sales. Just like how realtors take you around to go see houses that are for sale, a car salesman can become a person who takes you around to test drive cars for sale.
I might be wrong about your target market, but it seems like it is currently a market of wealthy individuals with high-valued cars to sell but no time to sell them. However, the quickest sales are the ones for lower valued cars - way back when I only had four figures in the bank, my only requirement for my used car was that it not make weird noises.
One lucrative direction you could go with this in the future is adding financing options, so someone could lease a used car from you and you could pass a percentage of the monthly car payments on to the car owner. Or, you could buy the car from the owner and lease it out to potential owners. I have no idea what the legal requirements are to be able to do this, but if it works you'd have a pretty stable source of recurring income.
Overall it's a great idea, I wish you the best of luck with this!
Asking for a phone number made me close the page. People use the web because they want to do things on their time and not to have to deal with people calling them.
To be honest, the phone number made it seem like one of the millions of lead generation services (e.g. limos.com) where your information is forwarded to a bunch of companies who then all spam you and call you for weeks to come. Email should be enough.
I have one right now that I will be selling (2012 Porsche) and my immediate reaction was a) I still have to prep and detail my car - I don't have to do that if I trade it in and b) 5% is to much. c) I don't want strangers driving my car. d) I don't want to be hassled with selling my car which is why I take the hit at the dealer. If you want to call it that.
Remember also that trade in deals are actually negotiable. Like anything else.
Also dealers actually typically try to slant a trade in toward giving you more money (so it gives you an incentive to buy thinking you are selling something valuable).
You might want to alter your % based on price. And also create a way of separating sellers of higher priced cars from more commodity vehicles.
I would write blog posts on interesting success stories with different types of cars and seller stories -- often cars are hard to sell for various reasons.
Offering to take a professional picture is your ultimate in.
A "voting ring" is when people get friends to upvote their stuff. This is against the rules. We want stories to be on HN because they're good, not because they were promoted.
It's sadly common for a great Show HN post to get demoted because its creators, eager to get it on the front page, tried to game it. I've noticed a pattern, too: usually their gaming technique is pathetic. Perhaps that's because they're creators, not promoters. Unfortunately, it has the side-effect of making it certain that the ring detector will nail their otherwise good post, while we carry on the real cat-and-mouse game with people pushing crap.
I've got what I believe will be a sweet solution to this problem, but it awaits time for implementation.
Please everybody, don't ring-vote your posts; just take your chances with HN's randomness. If a post is solid and hasn't gotten any attention yet, a couple of reposts is ok. Be careful not to abuse that, though, since we penalize accounts for reposting too much.
I'm going to demote this comment as off-topic so it won't get in the way of the real discussion. Send any moderation questions to hn@ycombinator.com.
I email my friends (that read HN) about finally going "public." Because they are my friends and they've heard about my ideas and work for a while now, they up vote.
What are the challenges of expanding to different locations?
In California, CarMax and other dealers don’t need to register a purchased vehicle in the company name. So even with her release of liability, the DMV considered the former owner to the registered owner of the ticketed vehicle.
http://consumerist.com/2013/04/19/woman-hit-with-traffic-tic...
I am pretty confident that California law is advanced enough to handle the case of selling a car to someone. Carmax doesn't have anything new in that realm.
Questions that immediately come to mind - how do you handle negotiations, and how do buyers pay? How do you pay the seller afterward? (cash, verifying a cashier's check - other comments point out the common scams etc.) (Or is Instamotor just a transaction facilitator)? Where is the vehicle listed? Do you handle smog checks as well (for California)? <- Those are the most common things I go through the used vehicle process.
Also, how do you filter out non-serious buyers, especially for performance vehicles? A lot of sellers ask for some sort of proof of payment or cash ready before a test drive. It seems like you're mainly handling high-end cars where the 5% commission will pay off too, how does the model change for say a $5K vehicle?
Finally as a buy I would want to do my own inspection unless the inspection is at a mechanic I already trust - there is way too much conflict of interest having the selling side do an inspection.
Some ways to get it more buyer-friendly would be to offer a CARFAX as well.
I cannot emphasize the importance of this. I have a 2005 Lotus Elise that I would love to part with, but I'm really, really nervous about an inexperienced driver blowing the clutch or just coming over for a joyride.
What I would propose is letting people ride with a trust local mechanic with the mechanic driving. That way they can make sure a professional is driving the car, can pick up on any issues, and can be honest with the potential buyer.
1. How do we handle negotiations: We talk to you, the seller and work to find a fair market price for the car. We have dealership level tools available for this. We come to an agreement on the minimum price you'd take. From there, we negotiate with the potential buyer and can take an offer up to the minimum we agreed upon. Anything lower we'd need explicit permission from you.
2. The Buyer makes a cashiers check out directly to the the seller. We deliver it to them.
3. The vehicles are listed everywhere we can, including some of the traditional places like Cars.com and autotrader. For certain cars, we also do very specialized listings (e.g. for Porsches we list or Porsche enthusiast forums, etc...).
4. We handle it all, including smog checks.
5. We get paid at the time of the transaction usually directly with proceeds from the sale.
6. With performance vehicles we are very very diligent about this, currently doing it manually. We represent a few very high value Porsches. We research all of the buyers (again manually, but we'll work on that) to see if they're legitimate and also work to get commitments from them. If we see an 18YO kid that wants to test drive a Porsche, we won't necessarily disallow it, but we'll make sure that he has the financial resources and intent to purchase the vehicle. It's not perfect, we're still working on this, but I can tell you all of our owners have been very very happy with the people test driving so far.
--Edit-- We currently offer CarFax. One thing we have to improve is enumerating the depth of service that we provide.
last thing I thought of - how is the communication facilitated? ex: asking questions about the vehicle's history
1. 90% of questions asked about a car are standard (e.g. what's the history, what's the mechanical, is it a clean carfax). We can pre-empt this by having the answer ready.
2. For answers we don't have, it's the standard "let me get back to you" and ask the seller.
As seller to protect yourself you need to e.g. meet the buyer at his bank and get cash or a certified check that the bank prepares at that time. Or use some kind of insured escrow service.
Do you guys have a geographic limit that you are restricting service to?
Thanks for the note. Yeah you're right. We'll make the update to clarify that. We had it as "saved" before, but that didn't seem to make sense. Still trying to find the right wording, but we'll update it today or over the weekend most likely. Thank you!
I jest of course. I think going for the simple "Get more cash out of selling your car." Is probably the simplest.
Dealership pays you: $5,000 InstaMotor pays you: $5,500 --------------------------- You get paid an extra: $500
I had the same issue. Couldn't figure out the 'you earn' part for a solid 30 seconds or so.
I think showing what they make from a dealer, then what they make from you like this:
Dealer Trade In: 10000
With InstaMotor: 10500 (+500)
The big "selling" point to me is: this is really easy -- and it won't cost you anything extra in time or money. In fact, you could end up getting more money for your car and with almost zero effort. Which, I think the copy does a good job of.
While I know what you are saying reading it quickly seems like you give 80% less than a dealer. That you are a worse deal. Might want to rephrases it just a bit.
I think something like "that's an extra x with InstaMotor" or "Make X more than the average" It's hard to restrict it down to just one word -- don't do it if you don't have to. I was very confused by earn at first.
Maybe instead "Make 2,000 more with Instamotor"
Edit: Great idea, by the way. I would love to use this service here in Phoenix.
The sheer number of resources one dealership consumes boggles my mind: all the people, the mechanics, the land, the land, the land, oh, and the other acres of land.
Disclaimer: I have bought/sold over 10 cars with Carmax over the last decade.
Instead I am getting this error: Sorry, we're not able to save your info at this time. And the div with that error is added each time I submit the form so you can get them to start stacking on each other.
<div class="alert ng-isolate-scope alert-danger" ng-class=""alert-" + (type || "warning")" ng-repeat="alert in alerts" type="alert.type" close="closeAlert($index)"> <button ng-show="closeable" type="button" class="close" ng-click="close()">×</button> <div ng-transclude=""><span class="ng-scope ng-binding">Sorry, we're not able to save your info at this time.</span></div> </div>
I like the idea of the service but I'm wondering what the difference is between dealer trade in pricing and market pricing. Even if I have to sacrifice a couple grand to not have to do the whole process, I'm ok with that but I'd rather know pricing from that point of view.
I'm also curious how you plan on doing the legal paperwork as I've done a lot of this too and it's not easy getting setup to handle all the paperwork especially if it's between two parties.
I don't think selling a car is really that difficult of a process, for me anyway. I don't know what California paperwork is like, but in Ohio, all you need to do is sign your title over in front of a notary. Besides that, it's just a matter of listing it on Craiglist and scheduling times to look at it.
For as well me I've had a decent experience on Craigslist - just some due diligence and research on best practices and you're good to go. But it does take some time and patience and dealing with flaky buyers. Just ignore the lowballers and the non-serious. However I'm sure a lot of people would love this type of service, especially in common scenarios where the actual seller is busy so they try to proxy it to a family member who really isn't interested in selling it. Or when they've moved out of state and buyers don't want to deal with that
Dealer trade-in pricing generally uses a standard called "black book". They base the pricing on the type of car the the condition of the vehilce. The discount of retail to black book varies, but can be huge (4k+). When dealers buy a car off trade-in, they have to price in the fact that they have a lot of overhead to get the car sold. Dealers also price risk into the car value, if it's not a desirable car, they will sell it at auction. They have to make sure they stay under the auction value.
Individual buyers don't have that. That spread is pretty large and we can take advantage of that.
The paperwork is actually pretty straight forward if you have a notary public available (we do). We can pull up all the paperwork necessary and generally get it done at each persons convenience. The biggest issue is actually trust between the parties and us. That's what we have to work on.
I actually came in the thread to post the same thing because I saw that on your web site and chuckled.
It would also help to list prices you guys sold cars at, not just 'X' over 'trade-in' price.
The way numbers are presented and compared makes you look a bit sketchy to somebody who knows a thing or two about vehicles.
I would suggest making the sell price in the big red letters instead of the "youll earn" part. That whole section is a little confusing and I thought it was telling me I would only get 2k for my 20k car. I only really care about how much I would be getting for my car, the comparison to the dealership is important but secondary, and oh by the way I will have already probably looked that up on kbb.com.
Thanks for the feedback, it looks like a lot of people are confused by that. We'll make changes and update it tonight.
Thanks again guys, really appreciate it!
Thanks for the feedback. We are focusing on the bay area for now but are looking forward to expanding. As far as the wording goes, we've gotten several comments about it and will be changing it soon.
Thanks for the feedback. We have added this to our todo list. We are still in the process of finalizing the flow of the site.
As an engineer, that really bothers me.