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CarFetch

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#11
Hi everyone, I’m Craig Burris, the Director of Operations at Carfetch.com.

Thanks for all the comments about the site. We are excited to offer dealers and consumers a new way to search for vehicles.

The vision of Carfetch is to be the most dealer-centric automotive search engine available. At the same time, we want to give our shoppers an unparalleled user experience by providing a fast, clean and ad-free site.

As many of you have already noticed, we crawl dealer sites just like a search engine. This does two things: First, we list all dealers inventory for free; second, we give our users the largest selection of vehicles available.

We started Carfetch to help dealer control the rising cost of SEM and third party sites. Our goal is to drive direct traffic that performs as well or better than SEM at a lower cost. As I mentioned, we list all dealers for free. If a dealer wants more traffic they can set a PPC budget with us and have their inventory featured in search results. Unlike a search engine, we do not make dealers bid on the click, rather all paid clicks are at a fixed cost.

Since we recently launched, our traffic is still ramping and we are focusing marketing on a region by region basis.

If you do not see your dealership listed, please shoot me an email and we will get it added.

I am happy to answer any questions you have about the site, our vision, and suggestions for improvement.
 
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#12
CraigB said:
Hi everyone, I’m Craig Burris, the Director of Operations at Carfetch.com.

Thanks for all the comments about the site. We are excited to offer dealers and consumers a new way to search for vehicles.

The vision of Carfetch is to be the most dealer-centric automotive search engine available. At the same time, we want to give our shoppers an unparalleled user experience by providing a fast, clean and ad-free site.

As many of you have already noticed, we crawl dealer sites just like a search engine. This does two things: First, we list all dealers inventory for free; second, we give our users the largest selection of vehicles available.

We started Carfetch to help dealer control the rising cost of SEM and third party sites. Our goal is to drive direct traffic that performs as well or better than SEM at a lower cost. As I mentioned, we list all dealers for free. If a dealer wants more traffic they can set a PPC budget with us and have their inventory featured in search results. Unlike a search engine, we do not make dealers bid on the click, rather all paid clicks are at a fixed cost.

Since we recently launched, our traffic is still ramping and we are focusing marketing on a region by region basis.

If you do not see your dealership listed, please shoot me an email and we will get it added.

I am happy to answer any questions you have about the site, our vision, and suggestions for improvement.
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Hey, you can thank me first, I was the one that posted it and the one that's seeing attribution towards CarFetch! ;-)

So what do I win??? :hello::hey: jk jk jk

You do seem like you have a similar model as http://autoweb.com (they were purchased not that long ago, by Autobytel)
 
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#13
Alexander Lau said:
Hey, you can thank me first, I was the one that posted it and the one that's seeing attribution towards CarFetch! ;-)

So what do I win??? :hello::hey: jk jk jk

You do seem like you have a similar model as http://autoweb.com (they were purchased not that long ago, by Autobytel)
Click to expand...

Alexander,

LOL, you win dinner and drinks next time I am in your area!

Autoweb, as far as I know, is only new cars and doesn't list actual inventory.

I know every company says they are different but I really think we are. I do not know of any other site that will list any dealers inventory for free and send 100% of traffic to the dealer's website.

One thing I am always upfront with dealers about is that we are not a replacement for SEM or traditional third party sites, like Auto Trader and Cars.com. My goal is to help dealers use a percentage of their SEM budget to drive higher quality traffic to their website at a lower cost than non-branded SEM.

Thanks again and I am serious about dinner and drinks next time I am in Pittsburgh.
 
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#14
CraigB said:
Alexander,

LOL, you win dinner and drinks next time I am in your area!

Autoweb, as far as I know, is only new cars and doesn't list actual inventory.

I know every company says they are different but I really think we are. I do not know of any other site that will list any dealers inventory for free and send 100% of traffic to the dealer's website.

One thing I am always upfront with dealers about is that we are not a replacement for SEM or traditional third party sites, like Auto Trader and Cars.com. My goal is to help dealers use a percentage of their SEM budget to drive higher quality traffic to their website at a lower cost than non-branded SEM.

Thanks again and I am serious about dinner and drinks next time I am in Pittsburgh.
Click to expand...
Yes, you are right about Autoweb, it's new cars only, but they had that same SEM tactic.

Be careful now, I am in Pittsburgh, I see you serve this region and can eat and drink a lot! I reached out via LinkedIn.
You probably work with Cochran, Day Auto, Baierl, Rohrich, Shorkey and Kenny Ross.
 
#18
Leslie St. Martin said:
How do I get a hold of someone at CarFetch.com? We have cars from our inventory going to their aggregation site coming in as leads that are priced wrong on CarFetch but correct in our system. It is creating leads for us that are not valid and affecting our lead numbers.
Click to expand...


Leslie,

I think we got you taken care of over the weekend. Please let me know if you have any other issues.

Thanks,
Craig

[email protected]
 
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#19
@CraigB I was just browsing the site and running searches on mobile to see if our inventory was listed. It looks like it is but I do have a couple questions.

1. Does the mobile version always default to 50 miles of the entered zip?

2. Is the default sort order always highest price to lowest?

3. Also does the default SRP always new and used?

Just curious to know, this is the first I've heard of your site and it got me pondering.
 
#20
I'm curious @CraigB : do you have any data on where your traffic is in the funnel? I'd guess these would be lower funnel buyers.
I love that it's ad free--that makes it feel super friendly and to the point. It does one thing really well.
It's kind of interesting that the filter for dealer is at the very bottom, and you don't include dealer details on each result (unless the dealer included their name in the photo)--you have to follow the link to find out where it is. What's your thinking on that?
 
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