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If your after a new car, your first step is almost certainly jumping online to see what’s available. Where do your start ? The problem for car buyers is that there’s simply too many car sales websites available. Where competition and choice usually benefits consumers, in use cases like this, it just ads to the confusion for an average user.
CarGrabber is to cars, what WebJet is to fights, simplifying the process of shopping online for a used car.
The web start-up is the brainchild of Australian entrepreneurs Chris Noone and Claude Morello. The idea was born of their frustration at the time and effort needed to search multiple used car websites to find relevant used cars.
Aggregating results from sites like Drive, Countrycars and Trading Post, CarGrabber currently has nearly 120,000 used cars to search through. Naturally with that many vehicles to look through, its important you can filter the list to limit results to find just what your after. Filtering is a real strength of CarGrabber, providing an abundant categories to refine your search. What I would suggest is that this needs to be updated to take advantage of the AJAXY goodness we’re now accustom to on the web. Having the full page refresh each time a selection is made seems very dated. Fix this, and the user experience becomes so much slicker.
If your going to make a short list of vehicles to you will need an account on CarGrabber. Fortunately, these guys have done account creation spot on. With an understanding that users already have plenty of online accounts to maintain and remember passwords for, CarGrabber allows you to sign in with Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, OpenID or AOL. That’s pretty much the big ones covered off. During testing account verification with other services are suffering some errors, hopefully these are remedied shortly.
Results are displayed with thumbnails and basic information, sorted from lowest to highest price by default. Naturally you can resort the results or further refine search results to get to a manageable list. Adding items to your shortlist allows you to return to them quickly after logging back in to CarGrabber.
Each entry also contains a link ‘View on Service’ which links to the relevant site the listed vehicle comes from. To make the purchase or get further information and screen shots, you’ll need to click through the link. It would be a nice improvement if the thumbnails also linked to the same location.
Overall CarGrabber is a great service that should be your starting place when searching for used cars in Australia. The site continues to add new vehicles with another 1,000+ added during the writing of this feature.
More @ CarGrabber.com.au
