Virtually Paul
Why I hate Car Sales websites
April 22, 2009 on 11:24 pm | In Links, Thoughts |I hate car sales websites. You know the ones. They show you all of the cars but they won’t tell you where they actually are before you submit your email address and phone number. This information is then passed on to the car dealer, generating a sales lead and thereby making money for the website. Regardless of how many times you put “Please don’t call me” in the comments box, the dealers invariably will call you anyway, at least once. Sure, you could conceivably act like a 15 year old and fake an email address and phone number to satisfy the input validation, but who can seriously be bothered when they could just make the websites user-friendly?
Tonight, however, I achieved a minor victory for prospective car buyers across the great state of Victoria. You see, fortunately for us little consumers we have these wonderful laws which require Licenced Motor Car Traders (LMCT) to disclose their trading licence number when they advertise a vehicle for sale. You will find this inconveniently placed at the bottom of each ad on the various websites, such that you have to scroll to get to it. However, once you have this little gem, if the dealer is in Victoria, you can use the LMCT number to get their address from the Department of Justice Public Register. Then you can happily go car browsing and shopping without them knowing that you’re coming.
Web usability: 1 Car industry: 0
Tell your friends.
(It’s been a while between posts, I know.)
5 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
Leave a comment
Powered by WordPress based on Pool theme designed by Borja Fernandez which was made to look a lot more generic by Paul.
Entries and comments feeds.
Valid XHTML and CSS. ^Top^
Glad to see you’ve been keeping yourself busy.
Comment by burks — April 22, 2009 #
your blog is in danger of being kicked off my sidebar… you’d better post more often or let me know you’re not going to. Either way.
Comment by Bec Matheson — June 25, 2009 #
Friend don’t delete friends Rebecca.
I would love to be posting more but amongst other things, I am yet to establish a stable internet connection at my new place. I’m hoping to get my hands on one of those mobile internet gadgets through work in the next couple of weeks.
In the meantime, I’m sure there are plenty of other things on the internet you could be ignoring instead of my blog.
Comment by Paul — June 28, 2009 #
The dealer invariably calls you because it costs the dealership $35 each time you enquire. Some dealerships have genuine bargains for the poor public and would like to sell them - hence they need to contact people like yourself.
Comment by garry — September 21, 2009 #
I was aware of this Garry. I did eventually buy a car from a dealer who doesn’t even have a yard and trades online. He told me all about the setup.
My issue is simply that I’m the consumer and if I tell someone that I don’t want them to contact me, I have every right to expect them to respect that wish.
No one likes all the other telemarketing calls we get. I fail to see how this is any different if I explicitly “opt out”. This was the point of my post.
Comment by Paul — September 21, 2009 #