Breaking up with Carzone, Is there plenty more sales in the sea? #KEC360

It’s been 7 years, 7 months, 7 days & I’m going to say 7 hours to make it look dramatic, all the 7’s is a coincidence but that’s how long Kevin Egan Cars was on Carzone, it was my longest and best partnership and it will take a while before someone over takes it.

I haven’t come off Carzone because they’re too expensive either , I still believe they offer value and a decent return on investment, the reason is simply efficiency, we’ve grown a hell of a lot over the last year and we now offer over 100 vehicles online at any one time, to get these to market isn’t easy & its very time consuming to do it right, since 2009 I have used Carbase, carzone’s portal to get cars to market, this meant the cars reached carzone first and then my website, the politics to get cars online now is frustrating with the main players Carzone, Cars Ireland & Done deal all refusing to take each other feeds which makes it very hard to get cars to market on various sites easily, it means double and treble work in cases and this is made all the more frustrating knowing there is one rule for one and another rule for others , Unless I hired ANOTHER person to get cars online we couldn’t continue to advertise on multiple sites, I needed a solution.

My solution for this was obvious, I needed to create my on feed so I could control where my cars were advertised, I have invested just over €70,000 on a turntable and hardware to take photos , this sounds like a lot of money (it is)  and madness but once I park the car on the turntable, Graham presses a button and in less than 5 minutes that car will be on Kevin Egan Cars, KEC App, Cars Ireland, Done Deal, CBG & whatever else I can add too, the photos are of incredible quality and have amazing consistency, on top of all this it’s a simple process to send this to anyone I wish, unfortunately Carzone just couldn’t be arsed returning my calls to get added to the above list, Maybe they don’t want my business? nevertheless their customer service is questionable “I’ll get back to you on that” is a typical response over the last few years both from the area rep and the office,

However funnily enough what was very efficient was their cancelation team, they were very helpful and the process was seamless, which obviously shows it’s something they are getting plenty of practice at recently.

Nowadays the other main players have caught up and dealers have jumped ship, I spoke to one of their competitors last week and I asked “ How’s things going competing with carzone, are you starting to catch up?” with the response being, “Carzone? Are a joking me, we’re looking back over our shoulder at them, its ………. We’re concentring on overtaking now”,

During 2009 – 2012 they were untouchable with no one able to compete, but in my opinion they’ve pushed dealers away with their price increases and poor service but to add to that they’ve also ruined the customer experience on the site, which has let others catch up but that’s a story for another day!  

My new feed created by DMAC Media with the help of Motorcheck is seamless and works perfectly with our new hardware. The other huge advantage our investment has given us is the generating of a 360 degree spin of each car, which in my opinion is again another game changer, with well over 70% of my website traffic now on mobile you can scroll around the car and look at every angle of the car in one image rather than flicking through multiple ones , its class and I’m in love with it, hopefully my potential customers will be too! Once we are clear on how to perfect the process I can’t wait to chat to others and see can they embed our 360 spin on their sites rather than just having it on mine.

If you haven’t already, it would be worth your while heading across to Kevinegancars.ie and seeing the new website in use, I’m sure you’ll be impressed and see it was money well spent. I’d love to hear your feedback so feel free to contact us through the website or in the comments below, criticism and improvement ideas are very much welcome too.