May 9, 2013

How we use Feedbackify to improve our website

If you’re shopping for a car on Mojo Motors, you may have noticed that feedback tab along the left-hand side of the screen tagging along while you shop. This little gizmo by Feedbackify was added to the site a couple weeks ago and while I was skeptical at first, I’m a belieber now. Wait, I mean believer.

As a startup, we can’t user test all day, everyday even though we’d love to. User testing has helped us determine our product principles, create personas of the people using Mojo, redesign our site, our emails and ultimately, re-imagine the way people shop for cars online. Read how we do user testing here.

This is where Feedbackify comes in. They’re helping us find bugs and other potential issues we can’t always user test or just haven’t got around to testing yet. We’ve been able to diagnose issues users experience while filtering their search and a problem with the way our images load on IE10. We should have known IE10 was going to be a problem. [keep reading]

Mar 19, 2013

Four steps to get your store beyond leads

As a former Internet Director, I understand the “I need more leads!” mindset that can permeate a sales environment. It is engrained in us by our management, the manufacturers and of course, third party providers whose businesses exist to generate leads. In the world of car sales, the lead is gold. Honestly, I think the time has come for a change in that mentality. Leads, as we know them, are slowly fading out of style.

Customers are smarter than we’re giving them credit for. They approach buying a car armed with even more information than they had the last time they bought a car. This means that they are less likely to give out their information so that you can contact them. They know how that process works and don’t want to be subjected to relentless sales calls and inbox spam. [keep reading]

Mar 14, 2013

Xconomy: The Automotive Industry Isn’t a Rust Belt Monolith

Story by Marc Weiser for Xconomy.

What do you think about when you hear the phrase “online advertising” or “big data”? How about “social network”? Do visions of hoodie-wearing young entrepreneurs dance through your head? Each of these are massive parts of the startup tech sector. In 2012, online display advertising was $12 billion; big data has become the new hot sector for venture capital with over $5 billion of investments over the last five years; and Facebook has now passed 1 billion active monthly users. [keep reading]

Feb 25, 2013

Best times of the year to buy a used car

As the Business Intelligence Manager at Mojo Motors, I spend a lot of my day looking through data attempting to find valuable pieces of buried information. The primary feature of Mojo Motors is alerting car shoppers when dealers drop prices on their used cars and trucks. Dealerships only want vehicles to stay on their lot for about 60 to 90 days. If they can’t sell the vehicle in that time, they send it to auction instead. Before this, however, they will continually drop prices.

Mojo Motors alerts members by email every time a price drops on a vehicle. Rather than browsing the web all day, shoppers can track the prices of vehicles they’re interested in and receive an email when a car drops into their price range. The real question at this point is how often do vehicles drop in price and what are the best months for finding great deals on used vehicles? Here is where I can help.

This graph shows the average number of price drops per vehicle on Mojo Motors in 2012. Dealers drop the price of a car an average of 1.32 times per month, but some months it happens more, and others less. Between July and October dealers drop the price of their cars most frequently, whereas January through March dealers drop their prices least frequently. This pattern matches the sales pattern of used cars. [keep reading]

Feb 5, 2013

Top 10 realizations about New England car dealerships

After speaking to dozens of contacts at dealerships throughout New England, I started to paint a picture for how a dealership was run and the type of people who work there. After spending a day visiting some dealerships like Madison Chrysler, Gale Toyota or Longmeadow Motor Cars, I compiled a list of realizations I made through my travels.

10. Donuts. They love donuts.

9. Smoking inside showrooms might actually be permitted.

8. Every person is a potential sale. Even though the salesmen knew our intention was to discuss our marketing partnership, we were still constantly asked if we were interested in buying a car.

7. The customer ALWAYS comes first. Meetings will be blown off if there is any possibility someone in the store might be interested in a car. [keep reading]

Jan 29, 2013

Release Notes: January Product Updates

In the first month of the new year we made some big updates to the Mojo Motors website. Each day the Mojo Motors office gets a “Release Notes” email from CTO Tae Oh with the updates and bug fixes made by the tech team. Here are some of the stories from the “Release Notes” this month.

- Improved speed and quality of sold emails by updating search logic and using Lucene*

- Dealers using Mojo Motors can generate a PDF of their store’s Activity Report

- Signup pages on Mojo Motors have been updated to reflect the winning designs from an A/B test**

- Vehicle detail pages (VDP) display high value features first like a sunroof, leather seats, etc…

- Homepage no longer displays vehicles without photos for better user experience

- Added dealership phone numbers to emails so users don’t have to click through to the website

- Created “New,” “Reduced” and “Sold” tags that are placed over vehicle photos

- Added rollover interactions on VDP to spice it up

- Fixed the bug where Lexus GX was being added to Lexus GS searches

* Sold emails are sent when users Following cars or cars that match their sold at a local dealer

** The headline now reflects the action someone took on the previous page like clicking the ‘Follow’ button

Jan 24, 2013

How to car shop using Mojo Motors

If you’re reading this, you’ve likely joined Mojo Motors and used the website to shop around for a used car or truck. If you haven’t, why not? We have some really special tools to help you save money and time while shopping for a car. It sounds so cliche, but hear us out.

If you have bought a car recently or you’re in the market now to buy, you’ve spent a TON of time researching online – over 11 hours. You’ve looked at photos, compared different models, read dealership reviews, figured out what your trade-in is worth, etc. If you’re like the majority of car shoppers you will also probably buy a car after shopping for about a month.

Used cars and trucks stay on a dealership’s lot for about 37 days which is roughly the same amount of time someone goes from a car shopper to car buyer. Throughout the course of those 37 days, dealerships will drop prices nearly three times, knocking off a couple hundred here and another couple hundred there. In total, the average dealership will drop the price of their cars almost $1,000. [keep reading]

Jan 15, 2013

Confessions of a car shopper

I was asked to write an article about our sales process at Mojo Motors. I’ll do that at some point, but I had an interesting email from a close friend that I’d like to share with his permission instead.

James, a freelance photographer, is in the middle of shopping for a used car. I gave him some pointers and sent him an article, “Confessions of a Used Car Salesman,” that I consider THE seminal work on the car business—it is required reading at Mojo Motors and should be required reading before you buy a car. The following is an email he sent back to me. [keep reading]

Jan 9, 2013

Mojo Motors Radio Spots

Mojo Motors is being played on a radio station near you! Take a listen to our brand new radio spots below.

Dec 20, 2012

Festivus Month – A December to Remember

Working at a start up company is sort of like riding a roller coaster. It’s awesome and scary and thrilling, etc. To celebrate the Holidays at Mojo Motors, the Party Planning Committee came up with Festivus Month, “A December to Remember.”

It started with cookies each day for pretty much the entire month. We voted on our favorites and the winner received a $25 Amazon gift card. Then there was a dreidel tournament which included plenty of Hanukkah gelt, you know, those chocolate gold coins.

Finally, there was a Yankee Swap AKA White Elephant Gift Exchange at the Holiday party complete with a singing Justin Bieber toothbrush and scratch off lotto tickets. See the pictures of Mojo Motors’ Festivus below or see them all on our Google+ photo album. [keep reading]

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