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The art of selling cars

Selling a car nowadays isn't as easy as it used to be. I recently posted one for sale and instead of receiving interest from sincere, would-be buyers I've been contacted exclusively by hacks and scam artists. 

One email I received was from someone named Shameka and seemed relatively sincere. She's a bit concerned about my listing price and would like me to check my car's value at a site called new-car-value.com. I almost did so until I checked a second email. This person didn't even bother to include his name and told me I am "crazy" to sell at my listed price, which is "way off." I pushed back a bit to see if this person would quantify what "way off" means but instead he told me to check trade-in-value.com. Is it just me or do those site names resemble each other?

I visited the sites (by typing the addresses into my browser myself) and both require lots of personal information in order for you to be able to get to pricing information on your vehicle. But clearly there is more to these sites than providing a price - someone wants to sell you something else. 

But that is beside the point. Wouldn't one think I've done a bit of my own research already? Such as scanning the listings on eBay Motors or AutoTrader (more on AutoTrader below) and checking Edmunds and Kelly Blue Book which are both legitimate and free?

Last year I posted the same vehicle I'm trying to sell now (I pulled it off the market for a variety of reasons) and used AutoTrader. No sooner had I posted my listing (which requires phone information) than I began receiving calls from third parties offering to help me sell my car. They didn't know a thing about me or the car - they just knew I had one for sale and wanted to sign me up for their service. They were so clueless, in fact, that they kept calling me months after the car was off the market and the listing taken down, and did this despite my requests to stop calling. This may not have been AutoTrader's fault but I don't care. I don't plan to use it again.

Selling a car online isn't cut-and-dried. It's no longer about posting facts about your vehicle and waiting for buyers to show up for a test drive. It requires some marketing savvy and instinct so you don't get ripped off and don't get caught in a scam. You have to sift through the crap to get to the good stuff.

Lead-generation sites are all over the web (mainly in places like insurance and financial products) and if this is the emerging version of lead-gen on the web it's a shame. But my guess is that there are just enough people out there selling cars who fall victim to the scams to make these particular endeavors worthwhile. I guess it goes without saying that if you're selling a car, seller beware.

UPDATE: An email from another spammer and, wouldn't you know it, the site is just like the two mentioned above. Someone named Chantelle Moore would like me to go to get-trade-value.com. Chantelle: perhaps you should consult with your spammer friends so that your approach isn't so obvious?

The billboard effect

I've posted some useful perspective on booking travel online here. Take a look. 

Not a Top 10 list, a list that happened to be 10

There are so many Top 10 lists out there that I just had to make my title that way so people wouldn't just dismiss this post as a pre-conceived list. It just worked out that way. If you believe me, read it here.

A healthy dose of paranoia

Where's the post? It's a Stu's View exclusive.

People you may know

My latest, posted at Stu's View.

5,000 days

Recent chatter on Twitter and elsewhere has been about the Internet reaching a notable milestone. Sometime in the recent past it became 5,000 days old. That's 13+ years, give or take.

That means that anyone younger than about 16 years old is roughly 1,350 days shy of remembering the advent of the Internet. It's just been there for as long as they can remember.

Someone in their early 30s can recall thinking, "What on earth will I use this thing called email for?" And she can also remember all the media confusion about what we'd call it. Back then people were pretty sure it would be called the Information Superhighway. What a mouthful.

And most people in their 80s remain confounded about what the Internet is. That's not to say there aren't people of all ages who are Internet illiterates, but only a small percentage of people in this age category are users. The revolution just sort of happened a little bit late from their vantage point.

But back to the age of the Internet. Is 5,000 days its real age, or does time move faster online? Rich says it does - at real time x 3, in fact. And according to him that's the perception of time, by the way. But I think the pace of change and progress online really does have a different sort of time continuum. So does that make the Internet "older?"

Let's say for a moment that Internet time really is real time x 3 (canines still have it worse unfortunately). That means the Internet is 15,000 days "old," or roughly 41 years. Seem ancient? Consider the pace of progress online between 1995 and today relative to the pace of progress that occurs offline. What other product or service has started from zero and gotten to a billion+ users in a similar time span? What other medium has become so dispersed, universal and fragmented so quickly? I'd say few, if any.

41 years is roughly half a human lifetime. Think about what occurs in half a life time. The first half of that half is spent growing up, getting educated and preparing for what's to come. One's 20s are spent experimenting with career paths and maybe going back to school yet again for some sort of graduate degree. It is only in our 30s, and even later for some, that many hit their strides - in terms of career direction, stable relationships and confidence in who we are.

Is there a parallel here for the Internet? Has it only recently hit its stride? Or does it have an identity crisis? What will occur over the next 5,000 days? In a sense I'd say the Internet has hit some sort of stride. We seem to have figured out many of the most useful ways to use it and are now continually refining and building on those methodologies. But in another sense the Internet is undeniably young. Take today's 12-year-olds - in about 25,000 days they will be 80 and will be using the Internet much more than today's older demographic and in vastly different ways than they are today. And that's a long time from now.

Since it's pretty difficult to figure out what things will look like in 25,000 days, maybe we can hazard a guess about the next 5,000 days? The Internet will still exist on your three screens - your PC, your TV and your phone. But it will exist in all kinds of devices as well, further integrating the physical world with cyberspace. Name the device - a suitcase, a watch, a book, even a child - it will have some kind of Internet connectivity. Ads will be different too - even more targeted and more relevant, and their use on phones, in video and with other entertainment media will be widespread. You'll be able to explore Mars virtually (it's in the works) and maybe other areas of space as well. Computers will be able to handle much of what humans still control - facets of search, communication and commerce. The Internet will penetrate all aspects of life.

The negatives? Information inundation. Even today we are in dire need of robust information filters. The Internet of tomorrow will have good ones. And privacy. With the potential for essentially every detail of the who-what-when-where-and-how of your life available online, you'll be in need of a really good privacy solution. Such solutions will be available but this will be a constant battle in the online world. Will there be adverse social and political impacts? Almost certainly so. Will a counter-culture of Luddites ultimately revolt? Some polls suggest more than half of people believe that will occur.

Predictions like these are fraught with uncertainty, of course, and likely to be wrong. A 1999 CNN article, making 3-year predictions on the same topic, calculated the Internet would come to a crashing halt in 2002 due to bandwidth shortages. So much for that prediction. But they remain fun to make anyway.

What ultimately is the significance of 5,000 days? Nothing really. It's a just a big-sounding round number. But it's also a convenient time to look back and marvel at what the Internet has become and what it could be down the road.

Ads, transactions and subscriptions

Thinking of starting your own online business? Reader Jeff is and is wondering what his monetization strategy should be. In the beginning you many not have this completely nailed down but you'd better be thinking about it if your business is to be a going concern down the road.

Here are the three basic frameworks for making money online.

Ad-supported

This model is widely deployed because it generally requires less infrastructure than the others (such as selling goods online) and can be easily combined with other models like subscriptions. Another perk is that once set up it makes money without you having to do much of anything. Take any ad that shows up on a website - when a visitor loads that site in her browser, code embedded in the page generates that ad which is targeted to the site's content. If the visitor clicks on the ad a fee is paid by the advertiser to the ad network and then shared with you, the publisher. 

In addition to needing advertisers, which is fairly straightforward nowadays given the proliferation of ad networks and businesses wanting to advertise online, you need to be able to generate extensive traffic or attract a specialized audience to make money. (I'd recommend setting your expectations low when you get started.) And not all information topics are profitable - people searching for entertainment or sports, for example, don't tend to click on ads to buy anything. And in the end, you have to find the right balance between ads and content which requires continual experimentation and tweaking.

Ad-supported businesses include companies like Pandora, Trulia and Indeed.

Transaction-based

This can be a profitable model if done correctly. Generally one can sell physical goods (more overhead) or digital goods (less overhead) or use a model in which revenue is based on transaction fees. All of these models can be very competitive on pricing, however, and require intuitive interfaces that users can easily figure out.

Companies like Amazon sell physical goods (e.g. books) as well as digital goods (e.g. music) and, despite the overhead it incurs for inventory, it does so profitably because of its scale. Expedia and eBay, as other examples, have set up their main businesses as marketplaces - the former connects buyers and sellers of travel products while the latter connects buyers and sellers of pretty much everything. Each collects a fee on each transaction that takes place. There are also plenty of niche products being sold online which can be done profitably if supplier costs are low enough. (In other words you're probably importing from China.)

Subscription-based

I think this is the best model if you can get users to sign up. Overhead is manageable and revenue is recurring and generated irrespective of usage rates. And as mentioned above it is easily combined with ad-supported models. A common strategy is to combine free content with premium (i.e. subscription-only) content. Or free features combined with premium features. The end game is whether visitors perceive value in the free stuff. If they do they might be inclined to key in their credit card numbers to subscribe. 

Businesses like the online version of the Wall Street Journal, LinkedIn, HomeAway and babyjellybeans are subscription-based.

That's really the simplicity of it. Or maybe you decide to go non-profit and take donations?

Top down, bottom up and the old new economy

The world remains fascinated with how things continue to move online and how the friction costs associated with commerce and communication have been largely mitigated. But the way people find information online is changing rapidly as well.

Before I launch into that, think about web 1.0 for a moment, if there really is such a thing. Let's say Fodors, the travel information provider, publishes information about visiting different places in Italy. It provides lots of good information about how to get to there, where to stay, what to see and what to eat. Then a traveler looking to visit the Amalfi Coast reads Fodors online and travels there and engages in her own unique and individual experiences.

Or take Consumer Reports, which provides product reviews and ratings on practically everything consumers buy. People go online, find the product category they are looking for and narrow things down by reading a bunch of reviews on all the different product varieties available. They then find the one they like and buy it, hoping their subsequent experience will actually reflect what the reviewer wrote.

The above examples represent a "top down" approach. It is the one-to-many approach wherein one person or organization offers broad, relatively homogeneous pieces of information to a diverse group of people who then use that information. It is the traditional way we humans have gone about things. 

Now consider TripAdvisor, the online travel community where travel reviews and opinions can be found for practically every place on the planet. A review on TripAdvisor might detail the experiences of someone who went to the Amalfi Coast, stayed at Hotel Bucca de Bacco, took a cooking class at Mama Agata in Ravello and later ate at La Tagliate in Positano. Maybe the hotel clerk was friendly but the rooms were too small and smelled stale, the teacher at the cooking class spoke five languages and had so much Italian flare and enthusiasm that the traveler can't wait to go back, and the ambiance at La Tagliate was boisterous but the pasta didn't have enough Parmesan cheese and the wine list was a little short.

Or take Epinions, the online consumer review platform. Do you think you know exactly what kind of TV you want and what features you want it to have? Odds are you'll find someone who bought that same TV and wrote a review on it. Not just about the TV itself, but how it was too large for his 300 square foot living room, even with the couch against the back wall. And how the austere design of the frame didn't quite fit with the Victorian molding in the room.

These latter two examples are the "bottom up" approach and you'll never find this type of stuff in Fodors or Consumer Reports. It is the many-to-one approach where the information invariably is splintered and personalized. It falls into the buckets that people refer to as user-generated content (UGC) and web 2.0, and it is increasingly the way people are finding and using information online. And there are a host of companies doing it.

Here are a few miscellaneous data points I've uncovered on such trends, although the data might be slightly old:

• Roughly a third of consumers buy online from other consumers.
• About a quarter of online consumers contribute to discussion boards, submit ratings and review products and services. 
• Approximately 10% run successful blogs.  
• Just shy of 10% upload video they create to the Internet.  

Consider this as well: while the number of worldwide Internet users grows at 10-15% and online advertising grows at 20-30%, UGC sites grow at 1000%+ with revenue from such sites doubling in the next couple of years.

Why is all this important to understand? Because it represents yet another step in the evolution of communicating and information-sharing that you can leverage. And it continues to change the rules further, not only for "old economy" businesses but also for "old new economy" businesses, creating new opportunities for those looking to change the rules again. (Take the news media as a quick example: newspapers are dying a slow, painful death, replaced by online news outlets. But UGC and blogs are supplanting those. It's no wonder the news outlets now all have their own blogs too. Is it too little too late?)