Motors - review my car website

flat-6

flat-6

flat-6

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
3,640
Location
Lancaster
I know lots of you like me spend ages poring over PH and Autotrader, so I made this site to make that a nice experience.

Its not finished so I am looking for feedback on it - what I can change/add etc to make it better so comments appreciated. Spent about 6 months spare time on this so hopefully its half decent:

http://carspy.co
 
Thanks for the feedback.

Got to work on some speed elements.

More advanced search options in the pipeline, also working on a iPhone app.

As for APIs - only eBay have one. So you can guess what was involved; not really sure what will pan out with this, just playing it by ear. It's not like I am stealing their content and representing it as my own.

Making a business out of it - that's my goal but I've made £1.60 in Adsense so far so hardly quit your job money.

If any web/.NET guys are reading and want to get involved/be a cofounder let me know. I have 2 kids under 2 so getting time to work on this is difficult!
 
Yeah its scraped per request. As you can guess its not T&C friendly, but then again every search engine is in violation of the T&Cs in a similar manner. As I said, just seeing what happens with it. If I get a cease and desist I'll have a rethink.

I <3 the images. I mean for car guys like us its pointless, but if you didn't really know what a car was it'd be useful right?

Z4M roadster causing a crash is bad - will investigate.
 
BigT said:
I think this is a great idea as in the UK those three sites pretty much sew up the market for where you should be looking. Perhaps gumtree as well, but I'm not sure how many serious buyers/sellers want to use free ads tha toften have tat in them.

Don't know how you're going to make money from it though. Long term I guess build traffic and a reputation to become the "go to" for searching for buying a car. Then you can start charging for "premium" ads that are outside of the three sites that appear high up the list on your search results. However that'll take ages and as soon as you start charging you'll get some sort of cease and desist from the two whose T&Cs you are violating. I don't know how much ad-sense income you can make form a popular site, but that's going to be the key whichever way you want to make money.

About the site itself I think you'd benefit from speaking to a UX professional or IA and get there views. Because it is a relatively ismple concept they'll be able to work magic in a day.
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Good stuff.

I think it can make money on adrev alone if it was popular enough. I don't intend to charge as as you say, the solicitors would be on to me like hot ****.

I have a friend who is an human interface PhD whose given me some good feedback. Why doesn't autotrader employ one of these people? Their UI is *so* horrible. Hence the need for CarSpy :)

Was thinking of tweaking the image search to include the years that are set, that should produce some better results.
 
Have considered all the things you bring up re blocking and them changing their pages of course. Just have to deal with it when it comes along.

I mean worst comes to the worst I could rewrite all scraping code using JQuery - then what would they do, if it was all client side?

But in reality I wouldn't do anything like that, if I get asked not to do it, I probably wouldn't.

If its a success it should drive them more traffic, and they still get impressions for their ads. I don't really see a significant downside for any of them.
 
Lucero said:
Also, I click on the results, but it doesn't take me to the same car on the respective website.
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Details/screenshot of this? Sounds weird.

Gumtree and Exchange & Mart are on the list. Dunno what their market share is but must be pretty small compared to the three I have already.

I am just lacking the time to do this stuff, so anyone who wants to work on this with me please get in touch. I want to start a company, quit my job, and take over world.*


* This may not be possible on 20p a day adsense rev
 
tankskun said:
Also why is your site .co instead of .co.uk? never seen that before.
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All the good .coms are gone. Equally couldn't get a good .co.uk. carspy.com was for sale, so perhaps if I get to the point where I can get some VC or Angel funding I can buy that or some other similarly snappy name.

I was considering motorhammer.com (I own that) but thought it was too long.
 
Yeah I'm aware there's a lack of Rovers, its on the list :)

Not really sure how it happened. Normalizing the make/models so it worked across all sites was one of the things that took the longest time.
 
Clarkey said:
looks like you ripped the makes/models from PH, Mitsubishi is missing a bunch of models for a start.

Those sliders definitely need to be unlimited by default too.
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Really? It should go from 0-150k in price range??

What I was planning on doing was setting what levels you had selected in a cookie so whever you return to the site it is pre-selected.
 
Yes pretty recently the .com was advertised for sale. I expect the guy wants low thousands $ for it though.

Not particularly allied to the name, just needed something short and relevant - that's quite hard to do.

Re scrolling - anyone else hate that? Its a nice effect I think but can get in your way if you are doing a lot of searches.
 
Robbie G said:
Have you any plans to expand services on the site in the future flat-6? HPI checks, reviews, etc.? Or are you keeping it simple?
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List of stuff as long as my arm to add, anything that would build revenue would be good like HPI check, insurance referrals etc. When I get it to a point where I'm happy with it I need to concentrate on building traffic to see if there's a viable business in it. So lots of blogging and SEO etc :(

Mini-reviews would be great, just a question of where to get that content from - hopefully cheaply or free!

Re mobile support, I might have a crack at www.jquerymobile.com and knock out a mobile version if I get time.
 
Right thanks to continued feedback making good progress.

Tonight's updates:

Model year column!
MX-5s for PH fixed
Some additional models added (Audi A1, A7, BMW X1 + some others)

If you are finding it useful do me a favour and tell others you might know on forums/twitter/facebook to try it out. :)
 
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