Innovations in Internet car shopping do not come without courage. The current trend in automotive website design is best characterized as "more is better". More flash, more music and now more videos. From our research the current trends are actually frustrating the average consumer and forcing them to use cleaner, more user friendly third party car websites.
Most consumers have an idea about the car they want to purchase before they
arrive at a local dealer website. The national manufacturer websites are often
first visited to get the features, colors and comparisons that start to create a
consensus. When consumers arrive at a local dealer website, they are primarily
shopping for:
price
convenience
availability
reputation
If local dealer websites make it difficult for a consumer to get bottom line car prices, consumers will grow impatient and move to another dealer website. Here are some of the problems with current automotive dealer websites that came back from our survey:
Dealer websites created with Adobe flash, often have navigational designs that make the navigation harder to use, not easier. This is not a fault of Adobe Flash but rather the web developer who is too "Flash happy." In addition, these flash website are not easy to use on a PDA or blackberry or on a connection with slower bandwidth.
The current trend of popping up coupons and survey boxes when customers first arrive to a website may work for a small percentage of visitors but most of the people we surveyed said that they were not interested in confrontational gimmicks. Consumers indicated that they wanted to do research on in-stock cars and prices first, before providing their contact and email information to a dealer.
Video clips of actors and actresses walking onto the screen talking about the
dealership is creating another annoyance. Often these video and audio clips are
mixed too loud. These unannounced visits make it difficult for people to go to
car websites without broadcasting to everyone in the room what they are doing
We responded to the consumer feedback we collected and created a website that has all the information car shoppers need to learn about Infiniti cars. We have made it easy to get a competitive quote from dealers in the state where they live. Notice that this site does not have distracting ad banners and gimmicks. Just a fast and easy tool that can get you competitive price quotes in minutes.
In the end, you would rather be driving a new Infiniti car than wasting your
time on cumbersome dealer websites.
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