We will provide the customer with a local unique way to add an auto advertisement and provide him/her with the tools that make the auto sold quickly. Also provide the customers that are looking for a car a quick and accurate search engine to find the car he/she looking for without getting unwanted advertisement as the existing website do.
Since we are trying to build already exist system but for different people, culture and language. We suppose not copy any successful existing system and business models. However, since we are not having any product to sell. We will have specific business models to be successful in providing our unique services. In Saudi Arabia, where our services intended to offer there, any e-commerce idea will be new to this country since most for the companies lay on static websites that do not offer any web 2.0 or web 3.0 features. So, people there still lives on the last era where the web 1.0 lived. However, any one who can offer products and services in Saudi Arabia via a complete e-commerce website will be one of the first successful people in the e-commerce world in Saudi Arabia. Anyway, on the Merchant model, we will focus on how we will provide unique and simple service that does not exist yet in the market and be the leader. Furthermore, for the advertizing model, we can use some of already exists services that big companies offer such as Adsense from Google or going the traditional way and post advertisements for local related business. Other type of revenue will be the subscribing or posting revenue. We will take a fee from the customer to place his/her advertisement and the fee amount depends on the advertisement features the customer chooses.
There are 2 major sites which deal with buying cars online on an international scale. Neither of the two sites is very established in that they do not have a high number of cars posted. Both sites are internationally based, however, and allow for the user to search on a number of categories, including country. Neither site allows the user to search more specifically within a country, by region, state or city.
Motorai.com is the more established of the two even though there are many countries for which there are no cars listed of the major model types. It has a simple, but nice looking interface with a utilitarian based shopping experience, where the user can immediately begin performing a car search choosing from many car attributes (such as make, model, price, category, year, mileage, country...etc.). Other items such as boats, motorcycles and insurance are also sold on the site, however there are even less listings in these categories. The site also provides an option for Dealers to sign up for the site so that they can post listings for their cars online as well.
CarsDir.com is very similar to Motorai.com. The majority of the listings on CarsDir.com are posted in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, most other countries only have a handful of listings. The major flaw with this site is that users can search only by country and car make, which makes it very difficult to perform any sort of advanced search. After a search is performed the user is presented with a list of cars which fit the country and make selected by the user. The user can then click on any car listing to see more detailed information about the car, such as the year, mileage, color, pictures...etc. The car listings are supplemented by a section of articles that have to do with topics including Auto Insurance, Auto Loans, Motorcycles...etc.
The nature of an international site where cars are bought and sold means that the set of intended customers will be broad. Anyone who is looking to buy or sell a used car will qualify as someone interested in visiting the site. First and foremost intended customers will fall into categories based on the country they are in which they are searching. This means that advertisements can be chosen to specifically apply to the country in which the user is searching for their car. Since the site will deal mostly with used cars, many of the users who visit the site will probably be in the lower to middle economic brackets. A large portion of those users may also be younger people who are trying to save money by buying a used car instead of a new one. Young people may also be more inclined to use the site to buy a car because they tend to use the internet more to research or make large purchases.
Our site will use various methods to attract customers. To attract impulsive customers, we will have an easy user interface and quick searches. The combination of those two things will make it easy to find the car you are looking for; even if it is your first time on the site. To attract analytical customers, we will have an advanced search that lets customers find cars with specific attributes and we will provide reviews on the cars. We believe the reviews will be the most useful tool for analytical customers because it will provide the critical view that they are looking for. To attract patient customers, we will offer a watcher function that sends search results to registered users. The watcher allows a user to save a specific search and then alerts them (via email) once the car they are looking for is found. These features will be available to all customers, but we will put the features for impulsive customers predominantly on the front page.
For the utilitarian shopping experience, we will offer simple searches on the first page. When a customer finds a car they are interested in, a link to contact the seller will appear on the car detail page. The car detail page will also have details on reviews for the car. As a result, the shopping process is two steps and provides the user with enough information to make a confident decision.
For the hedonic shopping experience, we will focus on images and related video. The images of cars for sale will play a predominant role. Search results will include pictures of the car. Car pages will also include related video, so browsers can watch for fun or research. The site will also feature recently added cars, so users that are just randomly browsing cars will have an endless supply of cars to view.
Our site will have two different types of visitors with two different goals and different conversion metrics. The first type of conversion that we will be concerned with is having a user post an advertisement for a car. To drive this conversion we will have to be competitively priced in comparison to other car advertising avenues. The ad charge should be a nominal fee mostly designed to keep the site from getting spammed. The process to create an ad and pay should be straight forward and as few steps as possible to avoid abandonment. The form should not require more information than is needed to pique the interest of someone searching for a car.
The second type of conversion is a user searching for a car and making contact with a seller. This type of conversion will be much more difficult to impact as the content a searcher is responding to is user generated. To aid in this conversion we should provide some tips to advertisers on effective and important information to include in their ads for the best results. To drive both types of users to the site the most cost effective way to advertise would be run a few different adwords and yahoo search marketing campaigns targeting relevant keywords and highly geographically localized. This will help in targeting users searching for our specific service in a geographic area relevant to our target market. Additionally providing articles and other information on purchasing a used car would increase traffic and hopefully positively impact conversions.
Attract: In order to attract and maintain customers, Silver Group is dedicated in providing new car owners and pre-existing car owners with the ultimate vehicle experience.
1. Car Owners: Silver Group is committed to attracting a varying of owners; new and pre-existing car owners. Our goal is to target a wide range of sizes and styles; sizes: coupe, hatchback, SUV, etc. and styles: vintage, economical to exotic vehicles to showcase on our website.
2. Community: Silver Group will support the needs of our community by offering them their own profile page; personalization, save favorites, enabling e-mail and chat and receiving e-mail newsletters with coupon offers.
3. Advertising/Marketing: Silver Group’s advertising/marketing tactics is using the traditional models and marketing channel model. Traditionally, we will mail catalogs to our existing customers and new customers. We will advertise our business over the radio and television through commercials. Our marketing channel model will advertise our most wanted popular reviews, car research and special offers.
Interact: Silver Group has applied many customer incentives and features that will attract and engage our customers to our website and we help to promote interest into transactions.
4. Quick Search: The Silver Group offers few clicks of the button feature; access find cars for sale, sell car, trade-in car, research cars, get loans, get insurance and find local car dealers @ the blink of a button. Silver Group provides customers with easy and quick searches.
5. Top Classifications: In order to increase search selections available to customers, there will be criteria for “Most Wanted” vehicles onto their profile page. An example, the “Most High-in Demand,” “Most Reviewed,” or “Most Bought.” This feature will give the customers the ability to research vehicles through other users and to seek most recommended to increase our chances of better serving our customers.
6. Easy Sign-Up: Silver Group is focused on having fast and simple new-user sign-up. The sign-up process will ask you to create a username and password along with security question and password. Once a member of Silver Group, not only will the user be able to personalize their profile page by adding their contact information, interests, etc. The user will also be able to access their profile page through their mobile phones.
Act: Our objective at Silver Group is to ensure the shopping experience is simplified and convenient for our customers.
7. Customer’s Criteria: When customers search and browse our website there are patient and impulsive shoppers. The patient customers just browse through vehicles searches: new, used and certified. The customer will read vehicles reviews, vehicle specifications; 2-door, 4-door, sun-roof, and Bluetooth, etc. The customer will low through high and low price ranges and look at the CARFAX certifications documents. While, the impulsive shoppers knows the vehicle they are looking for and they don’t care about the price ranges and they also don’t care about having to go through private sellers or dealers.
8. Contact / E-mail Seller: When a customer is ready to request more information about the vehicle, they either contact the seller by phone or through e-mail and the seller will contact the customer at the seller’s earliest convenience. For registered users, they have the ability to save their favorites onto their profile page and once they are ready they could go ahead and continue their vehicle shopping process.
9. Seller Update / Confirmation: After reaching out to the seller and they contact you with the information you requested and you confirm that you have an interest in the vehicle. Take the time to confirm a day to see the vehicle in person and see if it’s exactly what you are looking for before making a decision of purchasing a vehicle.
React: The Silver Group is dedicated in providing our customers with the best possible service any business has ever given.
10. Customer Feedback / Discussions / Forums: Users may comment on the website performance. Customers may post forums for discussions among other customers and be able to express their opinions and interests about vehicles.
11. Customer Service: At Silver Group we are always at your service needs; we are available to customers 7 days a week, 24 hours a day. We provide 24-hour online and call centers where you are able to provide us with your questions or concerns. At Silver Group, we care about the needs of our customers and we will do anything possible to give them the best service.
Our Business model does not support multi channel strategies as all ad posting and searching will be handled online by users.
The Silver Group is committed to serve its customers with outstanding website performance; reliability maintenance, error and virus detection and slow load times. It is impeditive that our business is available 24hrs a day, 7 days a week, to service the needs of customers and the need of our company. Our goal is maintain our website to be up and running at all times, however accidents do occur. In that case, we will monitor website performance through a website monitoring service to observe closely the stability and reliability of our website. We will observe how long the server to respond to requests; server not responding and pages not founds, or internet protocol routing errors. Our business values on having a secure website and strives in protecting our customer’s information. We care about brand erosion and we care about our website’s functionality and we will do everything in our power to avoid hackers and malicious hardware/software to interfere and interrupt any customer’s transaction ability.
The Silver Group will regularly manage performance of their website; stability, error detections, and usability testing. In order to ensure that our website is fully functioning, our business will create false personas to monitor the website abilities and error encounters.
As we monitor our website’s performance, we still need to maintain performance and speed as high importance. As customers navigate through our website we need to we able to respond quickly by provide an efficient website that allows us to communicate with our customer within the website. An example, provide 24 x 7 support and click to chat availability.
Silver Group is committed to becoming the premier spot for independent musicians to post and sell their music. To enable this, it is vital that we present a consistent message and “look” across our site. We utilize style sheets and other standardized tools to ensure our users have confidence in our message. Our DBA and code programmers work closely to maintain the website to be reliable and stable. The Silver Group follows Mobile WAP and W3C Web Standards and Guidelines standards and coding regulations; allowing us to give our customers access to use mobile device and to preserve a long-term relationship with our customers.. The Silver Group also ensure our site is scalable, bug free and that there is a proper and fast page loading.
The Silver Group has launched central office that ensures that our business is consistent and we have comply with the following standards: W3C, Open Mobile Alliance, Sarbanes Oxley, (SOX), HIPAA, CPNI. Our central office is responsible in seeing if our website complies with the standards our company holds; ensuring mobile device usage, compatibly across multiple browsers and our obligation towards regulatory and legal issues as a business to protect our customers’ privacy information.
The Silver Group we will perform advanced optimization testing once a month to check online adoption, usability, customer loyalty and customer satisfaction through Google Analytics. We also have launched online customer surveys; to analyze the way customers feel and the way they approach using our website
In order to improve our service to our customers we have built on the data and analysis from our optimized performance testing to help customize our site. In doing so, we were able to better track, customize and personalize all of customer’s profile pages based off of their preferences and interests. We added more applications to personalize each profile page, we added new car tech updates to those interested in the lasted technology trends for their car, we added the new hybrid and electric updates to those interested in economical and efficient car owners.