Website revamp

[Matthew Danskin]

I currently work for a large wholesaler who sells retail as well. We wholesale around 1200 vehicles per month and retail 250-300. We have grown a lot in the last couple of years and our website is boring, hard to use and outdated.
Wholesale Inc| Madison TN | Car Dealership
Since we began our website, we have added a 2nd location which complicates things further.

We want our new site to
-Convert lookers into lot traffic
-Look clean, attractive and memorable.
-Allow customers to search for a variety of criteria including Make, Model, year, price range, mile range, and vehicle type.

I would love to get some outsider opinions and advice on our redesign.

 

[Chris Cachor]

Keep the navigation simple, use large vehicle photos, and try to make the site "feel" very sales oriented. I would try to advertise different promotions throughout your inventory (possibly contextually). Last but not least, try to create an interaction with the customer more than anything. Definitely purchase a live chat solution! For the inventory search, look into faceted navigation over the drop downs as well.

 

[yagoparamo]

Mathew,

That looks like the free site that you got from Dealer Specialties... Dominion has pretty good websites, paid ones, that you can afford if you sell that many cars per month and that will pay back well over what it cost.

 

[subi101]

I'm a huge fan of Dealeron. They have some interesting and unique research based results and consumer behavior that they apply to their designs.

I would stay away from the scrolling design (because it is distracting and the whole purpose is to get them to interact with your website rather than stay on one page. Also, large buttons, clean layout, easy to find the inventory, multiple ways to contact you, and most importantly "get e-price" or something similar.

Good Luck,

Subi

 

[cmjerry4531]

Before you make your decision I'd suggest running a 4Q survey to see what information your customers are looking for on your site. When I ran it on my site I found out that 60% already had an idea of what they wanted, and just wanted the quickest way to see if we actually had it in stock.

Free Customer Satisfaction Website Survey | 4Q Survey

I'd also suggest spending some money on usability testing. I would suggest Userfly, but it seems their website is down. So, I'd suggest Clicktales. You can record videos of people going through your website, and identify different parts that turn people away. You can get a better impression of how people navigate the site. From there you can make adjustments, and test again.

ClickTale, The leader in Heatmaps, Usability & Web Analytics

As for the actual website, I'd just check out some of the top online sales dealers. Herb Chambers, Chapman Motors, etc. See what they are doing on their sites. Any of the major companies are capable of designing a good site, it's just a matter of telling them what you want. That being said, some companies are better out of the box.