Not sure if you're familiar with it, but Ling's Cars is a high-touch website with live-chat elements that ... whilst in a different area than yours, may prove useful.
One of the costliest elements for a car sales outlet is tire-kickers: people who come by, look at vehicles, tie up a salesperson's time, and don't buy anything. More to the point, they never planned to buy anything....
The auto dealership (online or off) wants to sort out the tire-kickers as quickly as possible. If you aren't currently and really shopping for a car, you're a liability. And the chances are the salesperson's missing out on one of the four people who might actually have a real interest in buying that day. The goal is to sort you as quickly as possible.(
Ling'sCars.com is optimized for driving away people who don't really, really, REALLY want to buy a car.*
Not saying you want to drive people away. But you also probably want to not spend much time interacting with anyone that's not really interested in your product.
'Ling'sCars.com is optimized for driving away people who don't really, really, REALLY want to buy a car.'
...and also people who want to preserve their eyesight?
I leased a car from Ling's site once. She's actually very business-like in real-life. At the time she was doing deals way better than the competition - still the early days of business leasing back then. Not sure how competitive she is now but the site certainly looks the same?
The rationale is given by Ling herself here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xZZ1c7diUI
I've written my own theory of the site (it is ... something else...) at Ello:
https://ello.co/ferdiz/post/p3wjs7hvw0zq-7qdrmyvea
(Also submitted to HN a ways back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9574350 )
Nutshell:
One of the costliest elements for a car sales outlet is tire-kickers: people who come by, look at vehicles, tie up a salesperson's time, and don't buy anything. More to the point, they never planned to buy anything....
The auto dealership (online or off) wants to sort out the tire-kickers as quickly as possible. If you aren't currently and really shopping for a car, you're a liability. And the chances are the salesperson's missing out on one of the four people who might actually have a real interest in buying that day. The goal is to sort you as quickly as possible.(
Ling'sCars.com is optimized for driving away people who don't really, really, REALLY want to buy a car.*
Not saying you want to drive people away. But you also probably want to not spend much time interacting with anyone that's not really interested in your product.