A new way to search for cars

At Carsnip we believe that car search is broken for both the consumer and for the car dealer.

Quite simply, consumers are not being offered better and effective ways to search for cars. The use of a mandatory postcode and a make and model dropdown as a starting point for every search is old fashioned and out of date.

Imagine if Google did that — let’s say you were looking for a new camping tent, the current search would require you to enter your postcode and know the make and model of the tent before you could even proceed! It would never work.

So we have built a new search that works for the consumer in a better way than they already know, use and understand.

For car dealers, the problems are even more acute. Enforced payment to include stock on the existing portals is an out of date concept. It is far better to help the dealer list all their stock and recognise the fact that the dealer buys the stock, takes the photographs, writes the description, deals with the consumer and most importantly — takes all the risk.

We believe car dealers are the best at helping consumers buy cars. So we pass active and qualified buyers to dealers directly rather than keeping them on our site. That’s why there are no ‘more details’ car pages on our site and only one photo — the detail is with the car dealer.

Over four billion (yes 4,000,000,000) car pages are displayed across all the existing car portals every year. This has a two-fold effect.

Firstly, and most importantly, these are clicks that the dealer should receive. A click on a car page on a portal says nothing about the dealers’ website, the other stock they have and the marketing messaging they spend time perfecting to encourage interaction on their website.

Carsnip wants these four billion clicks to go directly to car dealers’ websites. By allowing this car page to be displayed on the portals, car dealers in effect add massive search engine value to the portals: more content, more page views, increased time on site, repeat visits.

In addition, extremely valuable data lies behind the pathway of the search and the pages visited and is not visible to the car dealer because at this point they have zero visibility of the consumer. 
So how do we go about changing this? We have a staged approach:

Build a marketplace for the consumer, for maximum consumer choice you need to list as many cars as possible. So we index (or crawl) car dealer websites all over the UK, for free with no feeds, cost or technical detriment to dealers.

Build better search: we help buyers search how they want; by make and model, eg. “BMW 320d SE Touring” or car type, eg. “7 seats £20,0000 Nottingham”. Our aim is to get buyers to the car they want as fast as possible. Carsnip is also building many tools to help buyers and sellers to make better informed decisions by personalising results based on their requirements.

Start driving traffic to the website so we can measure what works for the consumer and the car dealer and then scale up the business.

How does Carsnip.com make money?

There is no charge for listings and no car ‘page’ as we don’t want to maximise time on site for third party advertising income. We pass interested buyers directly to the right sellers.

Soon, dealers will be able choose to advertise cars on Pay-Per-Click basis. This model is based on a relevance score within our search results meaning only cars that are relevant to the buyer can be advertised. This keeps costs down to the advertisers but still allows us to grow a sustainable business.

We keep our costs low and run our business as efficiently as possible. Every pound of investment goes into increasing the number of cars listed, improving search and analysing how we can improve the process for the consumers and the dealers.

Doesn’t Google do this already?

Google is fantastic at what it does, however some verticals, such as automotive, have very complex datasets where a focused effort is needed. Google has already demonstrated this, by acquiring companies or developing in-house, Google Flights and Google Finance.

One of our investors, who invested personally, is the Head of Special Operations at Alphabet (the new name for Google Inc.) which gives us great confidence that we are building the right business for car search.

@carsnip_al