NickR
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Used Cars NI - Private sales pricing
- Thread starter Used Cars NI
- Start date
simon4563
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As soon as i read the op i thought the same. Pages of £1 cars before anything shows an actual price
RubberLover
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Aren’t these guys forum sponsors? Shall we be a little bit more gentle and tactful?
BobSpounge
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No. Straight in dry, no lube.
Only messing.
Ok some comments are best ignored but if they want to survive they need to take any criticism on board. If Autotrader are taking away from them they need to address that and I don't think advertising cheap motors for free is the answer.
Yeah and we are customers.
andy9eleven
RMS Regular
Tiered pricing is a terrible idea in my opinion. Just because my car is worth more, it somehow makes it more expensive to advertise on an online platform. See Purple Bricks vs High St Estate Agent. But at least arguably an estate agent spends actual valuable time dealing and advising with a million pound house vs a 100k house. Your service is simply providing a platform to advertise a car. PropertyPal as an example, flat price (discounted for bulk) and have now introduced premium ads into their listings to get higher £ for that listing.
Terrible app, terrible website, terrible search, terrible pricing. Imho you need to rethink your business model if you expect to exist in the next 3 certainly 5 years time.
Good luck!
Terrible app, terrible website, terrible search, terrible pricing. Imho you need to rethink your business model if you expect to exist in the next 3 certainly 5 years time.
Good luck!
Used Cars NI
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OP
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- #35
Hi there,
Thanks for the feedback. Yep, we understand that it means taking a bit of abuse, but even critical posts are a compliment of sorts as if we had no importance to you at all then we wouldn’t be worth the effort! (Wink wink to you guys who never look at Used Cars NI any more). We don’t intend making more price changes any time soon, as this has been the result of a major review and quite a bit of number crunching. To answer a few questions, the reason we charge for private listings is that Used Cars NI is the only place to go to find 23,876 cars for sale in Northern Ireland. Autotrader is a competitor, but they list just 13,304. Used Cars NI is also the highest traffic site for the Northern Ireland audience. The Google Analytics stats for the past month show 15,980,000 page views, 1,696,000 sessions, and 481,000 unique users in the month. Per head of population this is higher penetration than any other car site in the world that we know of.
Cheap private sales are a free commodity because they are essentially a consumer to consumer market. Dealers generally can’t or won’t get involved with a lot of sales at the very bottom end. For the mid-market, if you want to sell a car privately and locally you are competing for the sale with a lot of dealers and looking to achieve a much better price than you would get for it as a trade-in. We think it’s fair that there is a cost to list those cars on Used Cars NI, as there is for dealers. One advantage for buyers of the two-week timescale is they can be sure the ads are fairly fresh as you don’t have sold cars sitting on there for weeks on end. This does happen with the best will in the world, as we find that people don’t always take the cars off when sold. It also encourages competitive pricing and generally concentrates minds all round. Our assessment is that most private sellers don’t actually want the car sitting there for a couple of months waiting for the best price (that’s for the dealers to do if they want), but they want a quick sale at a price they can live with.
And yes, we have thought of people trying to put on cars at £1 or editing the price after they have put it on. Try it and see . We value the car and look at the retail and trade prices as well as a recommended private sale price range. We then use the mid-point of that range as a marker for pricing the ad. In the odd case where we can’t get the data to value the car then it defaults to the full price, but that isn’t very often.
The protected number thing is something we’ve looked at before but were never convinced it would be a good idea because it doesn’t support texting and we’re not sure whether there is a big enough problem there that would be worth the trade-off. Having said that it seems to be popular, so maybe we should look at it again.
The mobile experience is an interesting one. Most of the comments we get about it in reviews are very positive, but we do get the odd negative one. There is a constant round of improvements happening and that will continue. In the meantime the stats show continued growth in mobile overall, so we now have 68% mobile, 20% desktop and 12% tablet. The next thing we are doing with the iPhone app is to add ‘more options’, which have been very popular on the main desktop and mobile site. If you have a particular idea about something concrete we can do to improve the mobile experience then feel free to call the office and speak to Stephen Johnston or Anthony McTaggart, who would be very glad to get your feedback and will pass it on to the product team.
All the best,
Cecil, MD
Thanks for the feedback. Yep, we understand that it means taking a bit of abuse, but even critical posts are a compliment of sorts as if we had no importance to you at all then we wouldn’t be worth the effort! (Wink wink to you guys who never look at Used Cars NI any more). We don’t intend making more price changes any time soon, as this has been the result of a major review and quite a bit of number crunching. To answer a few questions, the reason we charge for private listings is that Used Cars NI is the only place to go to find 23,876 cars for sale in Northern Ireland. Autotrader is a competitor, but they list just 13,304. Used Cars NI is also the highest traffic site for the Northern Ireland audience. The Google Analytics stats for the past month show 15,980,000 page views, 1,696,000 sessions, and 481,000 unique users in the month. Per head of population this is higher penetration than any other car site in the world that we know of.
Cheap private sales are a free commodity because they are essentially a consumer to consumer market. Dealers generally can’t or won’t get involved with a lot of sales at the very bottom end. For the mid-market, if you want to sell a car privately and locally you are competing for the sale with a lot of dealers and looking to achieve a much better price than you would get for it as a trade-in. We think it’s fair that there is a cost to list those cars on Used Cars NI, as there is for dealers. One advantage for buyers of the two-week timescale is they can be sure the ads are fairly fresh as you don’t have sold cars sitting on there for weeks on end. This does happen with the best will in the world, as we find that people don’t always take the cars off when sold. It also encourages competitive pricing and generally concentrates minds all round. Our assessment is that most private sellers don’t actually want the car sitting there for a couple of months waiting for the best price (that’s for the dealers to do if they want), but they want a quick sale at a price they can live with.
And yes, we have thought of people trying to put on cars at £1 or editing the price after they have put it on. Try it and see . We value the car and look at the retail and trade prices as well as a recommended private sale price range. We then use the mid-point of that range as a marker for pricing the ad. In the odd case where we can’t get the data to value the car then it defaults to the full price, but that isn’t very often.
The protected number thing is something we’ve looked at before but were never convinced it would be a good idea because it doesn’t support texting and we’re not sure whether there is a big enough problem there that would be worth the trade-off. Having said that it seems to be popular, so maybe we should look at it again.
The mobile experience is an interesting one. Most of the comments we get about it in reviews are very positive, but we do get the odd negative one. There is a constant round of improvements happening and that will continue. In the meantime the stats show continued growth in mobile overall, so we now have 68% mobile, 20% desktop and 12% tablet. The next thing we are doing with the iPhone app is to add ‘more options’, which have been very popular on the main desktop and mobile site. If you have a particular idea about something concrete we can do to improve the mobile experience then feel free to call the office and speak to Stephen Johnston or Anthony McTaggart, who would be very glad to get your feedback and will pass it on to the product team.
All the best,
Cecil, MD
andy9eleven
RMS Regular
Odd response.
Sorry if I appeared harsh above, but the world of technology and user experience expectations has moved on a lot from where you appear to be right now. Hope you catch up!
Sorry if I appeared harsh above, but the world of technology and user experience expectations has moved on a lot from where you appear to be right now. Hope you catch up!
Last edited:
Rocko
RMS Regular
NI_Volvo_Nut
RMS Regular
How many of the 23,876 are trade adverts compared to Autotrader…..
It would seem UCNI have moved away from the private seller and are more interested in the big money adverts and that's fair enough, but if you want to attract the private seller I for one would need a more competitive price with what I see is your biggest competitor.
Why no android app?
andy9eleven
RMS Regular
Chris Mac
RMS Regular
Indeed, the search options on UCNI is prehistoric.
Turks
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As for the two week advertising, I think it works out to dear for advertising. Why not make the prices for a month but after two weeks it automatically takes your ad down, but you have the option to re advertise for another two weeks for free if your car is not sold.
RickyB
RMS Regular
Cecil, you quoted that statement to me 3 years ago when I withdrew my business from UsedcarsNI after you had 4 Price Increases in 1 year......and how many has there been since then?? It was also quoted I would be back in a few months.......nahhhh no thanks
The members on this forum represent a wide spectrum of the NI Car buying public ranging from £500 cars to £300k cars so I would sit up and listen to what they have to say and not brush it off lightly.
surprising_skoda
RMS Regular
They were pretty sure I'd be back too. I left for the same reason as you. As much crying (and rightly so) all the general public users are doing about the pricing, spare a thought for the dealers who were being charged over twice of that with no discernable benefit. But dealers have to declare their position legally, so they are ripe for the plunder with every advertising platform going.Cecil, you quoted that statement to me 3 years ago when I withdrew my business from UsedcarsNI after you had 4 Price Increases in 1 year......and how many has there been since then?? It was also quoted I would be back in a few months.......nahhhh no thanks
The members on this forum represent a wide spectrum of the NI Car buying public ranging from £500 cars to £300k cars so I would sit up and listen to what they have to say and not brush it off lightly.
Autotrader is £37.95 per car for 4 weeks, or private £4.95 (online only) for 8 weeks.
Gumtree is £17.99 for a month, private ad is free.
I made it past £20 per car per month on UCNI but when it was announced it was going up again, it would have been just shy of £25 pcpm, I jumped off and ran away.
WSM
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I've no real skin in this game. I've been on UCNI a few times. I do not like the UI/UX of the site; that being said I'm not a huge fan of AutoTrader either so perhaps my opinion on your UI/UX isn't important, however, I do find it rather erratic behaviour to take the opportunity to ask for feedback and then ultimately negate all points with your own views. I understand it's your business. I understand you have the luxury of being able to do everything and anything you want, but, as @RickyB mentioned you're dealing with a very broad spectrum of buyer here and a very broad spectrum of (mainly) negative feedback. The feedback doesn't appear to be in isolation when it's a recurring theme.
It's strange you'd even bother to reply if your reply is as dismissive as it is on the main issue of pricing... Very weird. You take an opportunity to take commentary onboard, both critical and positive, because that's how you start to improve. In this instance though it's a derisory "Thanks, but, we're right, you're not" type reply.
You'd probably have been better off replying nothing. That being said... I think it's great you took the time to reply just shocked at the tone of the reply more so. As I said I have no real skin in this game but it's a disappointing reply to a lot of people who clearly do value (or did) your platform.
It's strange you'd even bother to reply if your reply is as dismissive as it is on the main issue of pricing... Very weird. You take an opportunity to take commentary onboard, both critical and positive, because that's how you start to improve. In this instance though it's a derisory "Thanks, but, we're right, you're not" type reply.
You'd probably have been better off replying nothing. That being said... I think it's great you took the time to reply just shocked at the tone of the reply more so. As I said I have no real skin in this game but it's a disappointing reply to a lot of people who clearly do value (or did) your platform.
WSM
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Which is why I find the whole reply so weird. If he's making plenty of loot, fair play. Good man. Well done, he's clearly a successful businessman. A PR mogul he is not.