automotive

Edmunds.com Relaunch To Focus On Intuition

Edmonds-B

Edmunds.com, the largest third-party automotive commerce site -- which gets about 16 million people per month looking to research cars, price them and find dealers -- is prepping for a relaunch five years in the making. The reason? The online auto research and pricing site wants to fix that last link in the chain between virtual vehicles and the real thing in dealerships, and make the whole process more intuitive for non-gearheads.

Jeremy Anwyl, CEO of the Los Angeles-based company, says products like Amazon's Kindle are the kind of cross-media commerce play Edmunds is trying to emulate. "The challenge is how to create a seamless value-added experience," he says. The company is running simultaneous tests on several home-page betas all designed to make the site more intuitive.

He says the final Edmunds revamp, which will launch mid-December, will be more consumer-malleable, offering a number of ways to sift new-vehicle inventory based on a range of parameters beyond traditional specifics like sticker price and vehicle trim. Rather, consumers will be able to filter hundreds of vehicles by things like monthly payments, or the technologies that are dealmakers or breakers.

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"On the old site consumers would sometimes price out a vehicle and get a rude awakening that they couldn't afford it," says Anwyl. "So we have created a calculator where consumers can put in a ZIP code and target a monthly payment. We calculate the sticker range. The whole point is to make it easy."

Anwyl says the new site will do real-time filtering with vehicle options changing dynamically with each parameter addition or subtraction. "This is what a good salesperson would do," says Anwyl. The new site will also have a scrapbook feature where consumers can save research and add notes and photos and the like and either save via bookmark or to iPhone or Droid.

Edmunds is also adding an element that is a first for such sites: a dealership-rating function based on consumer reviews of their experience with a given dealer around the interface between digital and showroom. Anwyl says the feature is intended to solve a problem native to the auto retail business, where a dealer's success often has little to do with how well it handles customers. "Sometimes the worst dealers are selling the most cars. They all suffer from a lack of credibility."

To fix that, the site is launching a ratings system based on consumer surveys about the dealers they bought from. "But we didn't use traditional surveys; they haven't changed much since the '80s because things like 'size of facility' don't really matter now," he says. "We redefined the process for the Internet era: we are asking if dealers respond to emails, for instance. Are they presenting the right information to consumers?" When the new site serves up lists of local dealers for a vehicle, the dealers will be rated on a five-star sales and service ratings system.

Next year, the company will add a virtual inventory feature that is intended to show consumers which vehicles automakers are actually building and shipping to dealerships. And in January, it will add a natural-language function for those who don't know car-buff nomenclature or don't know how to research vehicles based on established parameters, or pricing, and may not know what they actually want. "Basically, the new function lets consumers who don't know what they want ask questions based on their needs."

Anwyl says the motivation for all of this is relevance. "If we don't solve problems for consumers, we have no relevance. Most of our traffic is people who came to us from Google or Bing with a real need," he says. "If we can't solve that, we have failed."

According to a new study by J.D. Power and Associates, shoppers are most likely to turn to sites like AutoTrader.com, eBay Motors and CarMax.com for providing inventory information, while shoppers view Kelley Blue Book as particularly useful for price comparisons. The firm says shoppers prefer Edmunds.com for vehicle reviews.

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