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It is difficult to describe in words how varied CarMarquet customisations can be, and impossible to describe the dealer-side interfaces. This section is a gallery of pictures (worth a thousand words) to help convey the depth and quality of this product.
It is important to have a system that is easy to use. CarMarquet lets you add a car with minimal information; a registration number (so you can find it again), a make and model, and a model variant if applicable. That is ALL you need to get a car onto your web site and available to customers. The system will automatically display notices stating that pictures will be added soon, and feature details completed; price is shown as "P.O.A." until such time as you set the price.
The Vehicle Details screen uses lists of values to select from wherever possible, to make it quicker to use (there are not many touch typists in car sales!) and more accurate; it can be very irritating/embarassing to see ads for makes such as Citreon, Renult and Porche.
To ensure that you retain control of what is available to you, there are further screens to allow you to customise the lists of values that appear. You can customise car makes listed, colours, paint finish and body types.
The list of features is more heavily used. This list can be quite substantial, and is managed more heavily than other lists. As well as adding and removing features, you can also specify whether the feature will be highlighted to customers in bold text, and influence how the list appears to you on the Vehicle Details screen. The list can be shown alphabetically, or arranged according to how often you have used the feature on cars in the past. The recommended method is a hybrid sort, where the twenty most used features are shown alphabetically at the top of the list, followed by the rest of the features alphabetically below that.
If it is not easy to see a car on the system, a customer might miss seeing the one car in your stock that they want to buy.
By default cars are arranged by make, in price order. The make is clearly delineated, and each car is shown with key information "at a glance" - thumbnail picture, year/plate, make/model, body type, colour, mileage and price.
AS well as the default listing, customers can create their own customised listing, for example if they are only interested in Automatics with Diesel engines.
Clicking on a picture (or the "More" link) expands the detail on the car, with multiple pictures, detailed features and a sales pitch.
If the car does not appear attractive on screen, you will never get as far as seeing if the customer finds it attractive in person.
The display for each car is carefully laid out, with thumbnail pictures resized according to how many there are (more pictures=smaller thumbnails). Moving the mouse cursor over a thumbnail shows an enlarged picture in the main display, while clicking on the thumbnail opens a new window with a high resolution version of the photograph (at whatever resolution the photograph was originally taken).
But of course very few people carry a computer with web access around when going around the showrooms looking at the real thing, so you also want to have ...
CarMarquet realises that the ultimate in portability for most customers is a sheet of paper, so the web page has a "print friendly" link to produce a clear, professional handout sheet. This has all of the car details on it, and also provides contact details so the customer can get in touch and give YOU the opportunity to SELL THAT CAR!
When you consider that a car is the second largest purchase most people ever make (after their house), it is not surprising that customers like to shop around. They will go to one dealer, have a look, and go on somewhere else. As they go on to see more and more cars, they forget what they saw earlier. They compare the car they are looking at with the previous one, or at most the one before that. If yours was the first car they checked out ... oops, no sale!
Having a sheet of paper with all the details means they can always compare every car with yours. This does not guarantee that they will buy your car, but at least you know the sale has not been lost due to their poor memory!