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Kicking The Tires, From Afar and Online - Full + Link Posted by Scott Paterson [Email]  (#13)  [Profile/Gallery]
(more from Scott Paterson) on Fri, 13 Aug 2004 00:15:03
In Reply to: NY Times mention of Saabnet.com - time limited, DER, Thu, 12 Aug 2004 23:00:00 Members do not see ads below this line. - Help Keep This Site Online - Signup |
Article with link to free registration for NY Times articles online inlcuding email headlines.
-Scott
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Kicking the Tires, From Afar and Online
August 13, 2004
By LISA KALIS and DANA WHITE
SANDY GERLI'S eBay car habit started three years ago. He
wanted to buy a first car for his teenage son, so he went
online and bid successfully on a used Mercedes diesel sedan
for $1,700. When a truck totaled the car a year later, he
went back and bought another for $1,300. It only lasted a
few months, but "we got our money's worth," he said. He
bought a third for $2,500 last year.
Then there's the Mercedes that Mr. Gerli, who is from
Simsbury, Conn., bought on eBay for himself for $3,500.
He's still driving it three years later. Since he no longer
needed his old sedan, he auctioned it off for $4,200.
"Whatever car I buy next," he said, "I'll do it online."
Everyone is a used-car salesman these days. With the
proliferation of auto-related Web sites, the computer has
become a vast used-car lot, where you can buy, sell, buy
again and then sell again, all with just a few clicks of
the mouse. It's the automobile as Beanie Baby: plentiful,
desirable and easily accessible.
"Online car shopping and selling has made it possible for
people to be a little more cavalier about buying and
selling cars," said Chip Perry, the chief executive of
AutoTrader.com, which features used-car ads from both
dealers and individuals. "People are much more willing to
buy and sell on a regular basis as opposed to feeling like
they're stuck with a car."
There is a range of sites, from general to brand-specific,
ready to help. Most provide online versions of classified
ads, but with better visuals, thanks to the digital camera.
They usually charge $15 to $50 for an ad, and then it's up
to the buyer and seller to negotiate the deal. Autobytel is
home to some 18,000 ads posted by private sellers every
month, a number that has been growing about 10 percent a
year.
Repeat business seems to be a staple of the Web. At
AutoTrader.com, about 25 percent of the visitors to the
Sell Your Car pages (with 26,000 ads a month) have already
sold a car online, the company says.
Joseph Mrak has sold three cars in the last four years, at
prices ranging from $17,500 to $29,000, through ads on a
Web site called the Saab Network (http://www.saabnet.com, limited
to Saabs). For Mr. Mrak, a marketing executive from
Philadelphia, car buying is "an every-year occasion - I
have a short attention span," he said. He bought his
current car, a new Volkswagen Passat, with the thought that
it would hold its value well; he plans to sell it online
next year.
He also seems to have found a profitable niche. "Five-speed
manual cars sell very quickly," he said. "They're harder to
find."
In an annual study released in July, J. D. Power &
Associates said that for the first time, more people found
their used cars on the Internet than through newspaper ads:
11 percent for the Internet vs. 9 percent for newspapers.
(Of the remaining buyers, 35 percent "looked at dealer lots
as I drove by," as the Power survey put it; 17 percent "had
previous experience with seller"; 11 percent were
introduced to the seller by a friend or relative; and 17
percent found theirs in "used car trader" magazines, by
spotting "for sale" signs, by telephoning dealers or by
other means.)
The morning after Steve Cloud of Tallahassee, Fla., listed
his 1993 Mustang with AutoTrader.com, a man called, drove
300 miles and bought the car for $3,500. "He came in the
kitchen and started laying hundred-dollar bills on the
table," Mr. Cloud said. "It sold in less than 24 hours."
Why was he selling? He had bought another Mustang at the
same Web site a few weeks earlier. He had been looking in
Tallahassee for months but could never find what he wanted:
a 1999 or later model in black, with a leather interior. He
finally found one online 200 miles away, for $10,400. He
called the owner Tuesday, sent the check Wednesday and
picked the car up Sunday. Mr. Cloud, a manager at an
auto-parts store, said that he asked enough questions to
feel confident it was in good shape.
Long-distance deals are hardly unusual these days. From
across the country, buyers can arrange for an inspection or
using the vehicle identification number, can check on the
vehicle's history. There's a fair amount of trust involved,
but buyers seem to have it. At eBay Motors, the used-car
arm of the online auction company, 75 percent of the cars
are sold to someone in another state, eBay says.
The idea for eBay Motors came to Simon Rothman, now its
global vice president, in 1999 when he was was browsing the
eBay site for scale-model die-cast cars and spotted a
full-size Ferrari 355 for sale.
"People were trying to list real cars next to toy cars," he
said. "This was a signal. We said, `Let's go in with
collector cars and exotics first, and if this proves out,
let's continue to move toward mass markets.' "
IN four years, the top-selling cars on the site have gone
from vintage Mustangs and Corvettes to Honda Accords and
Ford Tauruses. Now, eBay Motors says that it expects to
sell $9.8 billion worth of cars, parts, boats, motorcycles
and other vehicles this year. (Consumer electronics ranked
second at eBay, with a projected $2.5 billion in total
sales.) "It's average people in average towns buying and
selling average cars," Mr. Rothman said.
After easily selling her husband's Lexus and her father's
Toyota online, Pam Bosetti of Richmond, Va., realized that
the Internet offered a quick fix for buyer's remorse. When
she and her husband found a new 2003 Honda Odyssey minivan
on a dealer's lot that seemed like a great deal, they
couldn't pass it up, even though her husband wasn't crazy
about it. "If the Odyssey didn't work out, I knew, in the
back of my mind, how easy it would be to sell," she said.
And that's what she did, after driving the Odyssey 7,000
miles. The couple, who bought it for $28,000 last
September, sold it for $25,800 in April.
The buyer was Steven Debevec, a mechanical engineer from
Wake Forest, N.C., and no stranger to the process himself.
He had bought a car in January on eBay, a 2001 Saab 9-3
convertible for $12,700 ("My toy," he calls it). The
Odyssey, which his wife drives, is his family's third
vehicle; his 16-year-old son has a pickup truck.
posted by 64.139.3...
Article plus link for free registration to NY Times Online
_______________________________________ Saabnet.com Webmaster Saabs Owned: 1973 Saab Sonett III (Current) 1983 Saab 900 Turbo 1985 Saab 900 Sedan 1990 Saab 900 1992 Saab 900S 1999 Saab 9-3 Turbo 2005 Saab 9-2X Aero (RIP 95K/Accident-guy ran stop sign) 2005 Saab 9-2X Aero (Current) 2007 Saab 9-3 SportCombi 2010 Saab 9-3X Wagon Winner 1996 Saab Owners Convention Rally Novice Class Winner 1999 Saab Owners Convention Rally (All Classes) Also Founder of two non-profits: Poverty2Prosperity.org RunClubMenloPark.org
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