Startup Latest To Try To Lower Consumers’ Car-Buying Costs. Entrepreneurs have for years tried to make it easier for car buyers vs. car dealers. “I’ve never been through a process that’s more painful when I’ve tried to buy something — ever,” said Tommy McClung, CEO and co-founder of CarWoo, a startup trying the newest approach online. “I got all the games the dealers could play and lots of spam. I thought ‘there’s got to be a better way.’” Even before the Internet became ubiquitous, firms arose that tried to get car dealerships to submit bids to customers so the lowest price could prevail. “They used to call that the fax attack method five to 10 years ago,” McClung said. On Wednesday, McClung’s Burlingame, Calif. “We’ve got a channel of communications that can go back and forth between dealer and consumer,” McClung said.
The consumer is never obligated to buy, but in early testing 80% of users do — and often pay $400-$500 less for a car than they would with other online approaches, he says. “We have all cloud-based computing servers,” McClung said. Looking To Buy A Car? CarWoo! Could Offer You An Edge | Car News Gossip. Car Who? CarWoo Says It's Changing New Car Buying - All Car Tech.
Dealer Buying cars on the Internet has not changed much over the years, even as more and more transactions are completed over the Internet on sites like Craigslist and Auto Trader for used vehicles. Customers scour pages and pages of advertisements even after selecting the exact vehicle they are looking for; worse yet, they have to deal with the hassles of negotiating with a dealership salesman even when bringing a price to the negotiating table. A new site hopes to change all that. CarWoo, which launched Wednesday, wants to take away the pain and the fear of dealing with car dealers when searching for new vehicles. CarWoo wants to give more buying power to the customer, allowing them to advertise what they want to buy, and then have dealers come to them, instead of the other way around. The Web site says its system starts with a potential buyer, who inputs everything they are looking for, from year, make, model, and even specific features. [SocialCarNews]
CarWoo! is a Great Way to Get the Best Deal on a New Car. If you hate the concept of haggling with a new car salesman, but want to get the best deal on a new car, CarWoo! May be the perfect solution. CarWoo! Is an online service that gets dealers to bid against each other to give you the best price on a new car, while keeping your identity private. How it Works Once you decide what car you want, you enter your choice into CarWoo! CarWoo! Built in commenting lets buyers and dealers communicate directly, but only when the buyer wants. If you get stuck during the process, or have any questions about the information you’re receiving from dealers or financing options, such as leasing, CarWoo! Once you settle on a price with a dealer, you print out your CarWoo! How it’s priced There are two CarWoo! If you’re serious about buying a car, this is a small price to pay for the convenience of not having to negotiate with multiple dealers directly and, in theory, should more than pay for itself in savings.
It still pays to be prepared Though the CarWoo! CarWoo raises $4.5 million | San Francisco Business Times. CarWoo, an Internet-based service that gives subscribers access to competing offers from dealers for new automobile sales, has raised $4.5 million in funding from Interwest Partners, Comcast Interactive Capital, Blumberg Capital and Accelerator Ventures, among others. Previously, the Burlingame company received $1.5 million in seed financing after finishing the Y Combinator incubator program in Mountain View in late 2009. Subscribers pay $19 for basic service, which delivers quotes from two to three dealers, or $49 a month, which brings three to five competing dealer quotes. CarWoo's CEO is Tommy McClung, and the CTO is Erik Landerholm, both co-founders. Patrick Hoge covers technology for the San Francisco Business Times. Contact him at phoge@bizjournals.com or (415) 288-4949. Read his blog postings at Bay Area BizTalk. CarWoo Promises Car Buyers Hassle-Free Quotes Online, Raises $4.2 Million.
Wade Roush10/13/10 The Internet was supposed to make car shopping easier, Tommy McClung is explaining. Back in the 1990s, sites like Vehix.com, Cars.com, and Autotrader.com promised a future where you wouldn’t have to haggle with a salesman, and where you didn’t have to drive from dealer to dealer just to see who could offer the best price or who had the model and color you wanted in stock. Well, it didn’t quite work out that way. The major car shopping sites, McClung argued to me yesterday, have turned into little more than lead-generation engines for car dealers, where shoppers are enticed into handing over their personal information and are promptly buried in spam and phone calls from pushy salespeople.
“The industry has started to realize that they have created a disservice to customers,” McClung says. And it’s not like dealers are profiting either: McClung says they’re lucky if five out of 100 leads results in sale. Naturally, McClung has a solution. CarWoo unveils a better way to buy a car. As the influence of the Internet creeps into more and more of our lives, the car-buying process is one of the few areas that remains untouched — at least, that’s what Tommy McClung, cofounder and chief executive of CarWoo, argues. Sure, people can do more research on the Web before they buy, but the basic process remains the same, and often painful.
McClung aims to change that. The idea behind the site is to give the buyer more control over the car-purchasing process. Instead of showing up at a few car dealerships and hoping that you can negotiate your way into a good deal, CarWoo users post what they’re looking for on the site. If you know exactly what you want, you can be very specific in your listing, including the exact model and features.
If you’re less certain, or if you care more about price, the listing can be more open-ended. Then it’s the car dealers’ turn to try to win your purchase. Looking To Buy A Car? CarWoo! Could Offer You An Edge - Auto News. CarWoo! aims to eliminate haggling for a new car. CarWoo: AppScout. Few people enjoy the back-and-forth you get with a car salesman, regardless of whether you're buying new or used.
Haggling with the sales rep over features, and then haggling with the back-office staff over financing; it's all so awful that it's inspired businesses like CarMax to rise up and make buying cars a no-haggle, hassle-free experience. Still, many of us wonder whether we're getting the best possible price if we don't haggle, or if we don't go to another dealership and tackle their sales reps instead. Enter CarWoo, a new service that just launched this week and promises to make dealerships in your area compete for your business.
You tell the service the type of car you're shopping for, and CarWoo sends your request out to its national network of over 3,000 dealers. The dealers in your region then take a look at the features you're interested in and send you quotes for the car of your dreams. From there, CarWoo allows you to name your own price. CarWoo | Car Vehicle Blog. CarWoo! Offers Dealers Best Way to Find Buyers; Online Service Delivers Paying Buyers at No Charge to Dealers. Log In to The List Online » The List. CarWoo! The easiest way to buy a new car! | video, tunning, news. CarWoo!, New Service to Transform Car Buying, Closes Series A Funding | good news. CarWoo! The easiest way to buy a new car! | iPhone Discovery. CarWoo.com - Buy The Car Of Your Dreams | Visit carwoo. CarWoo is a service that aims to redefine the process in which cars have always been bought and sold. It basically reverses everything: instead of having to go to your local car dealership, you will be allowed to post a listing detailing your exact requirements.
You can be as concise as you want. If you want a specific car model with this and that feature and nothing else will do, then you will be able to ask for that. Or you can just focus on the price, and have people who can provide you with a vehicle that meets your budget approach you. In any case, once the listing has been posted local dealers will see it and approach you to start a negotiation. CarWoo.com In Their Own Words “The right car, the right price, the right way. Why CarWoo.com It Might Be A Killer The whole focus is on the customer – he specifies what he needs, and then it’s up to local dealers to place a winning bid.
Some Questions About CarWoo.com Are there sites like this one but for other vehicles? CarWoo Promises to Take the Hassle Out of Car Buying. Buying a new car should be fun, but the haggling over prices and high-pressure sales tactics at many dealerships can quickly make it anything but an enjoyable experience. CarWoo, which officially launches today, wants to transform car buying by giving its users the ability to negotiate prices and get quotes from multiple dealers online. While there are already plenty of car buying sites online that aim to help consumers, CarWoo claims that its system is not only more open and transparent (the competing dealers see each others' quotes, for example), but also one of the few sites that are actually working for the consumer and are not beholden to the dealerships. To use CarWoo, consumers have to pay.
For $19, you can get up to 3 dealerships compete with each other for their business and for $49, CarWoo guarantees that you will get the lowest price and lets up to 5 dealerships compete (the company offers a money back guarantee if you are not satisfied). Startup Latest To Try To Lower Consumers’ Car-Buying Costs. CarWoo takes the cheap suit out of car sales | The Daily Caller - Breaking News, Opinion, Research, and Entertainment. If you’ve ever contacted a car dealer online, you’re familiar with the internet sales pitch: relentless phone calls and e-mails making almost any promise just to get a warm body in the showroom.
CarWoo, aims to change that by connecting you with firm offers from dealers while preserving your privacy. The new service only helps out with new car sales right now, though the company says it may open up to used cars at some point. Here’s how it works. Shoppers pay a fee to CarWoo and select the car they want. Depending upon which plan they choose, CarWoo will facilitate quotes from two to five nearby dealerships. Buyers are free to negotiate the final price, but rather sitting in some cubicle while the saleman makes repeated trips to “talk to the manager,” it all happens anonymously online. Full story: CarWoo Takes the Cheap Suit Out Of Car Sales | Wired.com. CarWoo! changing our car-buying experience. Last week, while I was helping my daughter negotiate to buy a new car, I received an e-mail from CarWoo! , a new over-the-Internet auto-buying service, alerting me of its new product that was about to be announced.
After several weeks of searching, my daughter had just found the specific car she wanted and was able to negotiate what we thought to be a good price, according to the dealer at invoice. But she agreed to delay her purchase for a few days to see what this service could do. CarWoo! , a Silicon Valley startup, offers a clever new twist on car buying that's different from other car buying services.
I've used a variety of car-buying approaches over the years. CarWoo! I used the Plus plan and filled out the request for bids on a 2011 328i BMW with specific equipment that had a sticker price of exactly $43,000. Two offers came in at $40,300 and $40,495, compared to the deal we had struck with our original dealer of $40,190. CarWoo! CarWoo: Haggling for a Great Car Price, Without the Haggling Part. When I bought my first car, in 1987, I don’t think computers were involved in any way.
I bought another one in 1991, and may have done some research on CompuServe–I don’t recall. By 1996, I used a couple of snazzy CD-ROMs to help me pick a ride. And in 2004, I did most of my research online and got a decent price on the car I still own by taking advantage of an exciting “Internet Price” that turned out to be an assistant calling me on the phone with an offer in response to a form I’d filled out. Basically, though, the Internet still hasn’t had as much impact on the complex (and sometimes tortuous) process of buying an automobile as it has on most other forms of commerce.
CarWoo isn’t a research site–it wants shoppers to show up once they already know what model they want to buy and are deciding where to get it. When I heard about the service, I assumed that the company would make money by collecting a fee from dealers. CarWoo.com Transforms Car Buying: Haggling Be Gone. CarWoo Takes the Cheap Suit Out Of Car Sales | Autopia. If you’ve ever contacted a car dealer online, you’re familiar with the internet sales pitch: relentless phone calls and e-mails making almost any promise just to get a warm body in the showroom.
CarWoo, aims to change that by connecting you with firm offers from dealers while preserving your privacy. The new service only helps out with new car sales right now, though the company says it may open up to used cars at some point. Here’s how it works. Shoppers pay a fee to CarWoo and select the car they want.
Depending upon which plan they choose, CarWoo will facilitate quotes from two to five nearby dealerships. Buyers are free to negotiate the final price, but rather sitting in some cubicle while the saleman makes repeated trips to “talk to the manager,” it all happens anonymously online. Think of it as eBay in reverse. Buyers indicate how much they’re willing to pay and sellers decide whether the offer is acceptable. Don’t think that dealers are getting a raw deal, though.