Short Competition Comparison
Autotrader.com
Did you know that this is the same as eBay Motors? On March 7, 2000 the two companies signed an agreement to list autotrader.com vehicles on eBay. I'm not sure how successful this agreement has been since eBay only appears to list 34,237 passenger vehicles while autotrader listed far more then that. Autotrader began operations in May 1995 (online website that is). Keep in mind that they benefited from immediate name recognition because of the Autotrader paper version available at many gas stations. Autotrader has a link to over 60,000 vehicles in the UK and a link to locators in Australia will soon be up and running. I believe that IDWS/NNFA can learn alot from studying how autotrader got to where they are and they stand to benefit by avoiding many of the growing pains.
Beepbeep.com
This one was brought to my attention by "he who will remain nameless". At least I think that is who it was. Possibly his only piece of real contribution to this board. Anyways, this site was started in April 1996, but has clearly not had that much success. BY my count they have deals with dealers in 10 cities. I didn't have the time to go through each of them but I did a few and came up with about an average of 25 dealers per city. Each dealer appeared to have an average of 200 vehicles listed in inventory. That comes to about 50,000 vehicles total on the site. This is even more then eBay.
995ad.com
Working on agreements with 12,900 dealers and plan to have over 500,000 vehicles listed on their site shortly. The site began in February 2005 but I can't really find much activity there until the August time frame. So I assumed that they didn't strike the deals with the dealers until August. So thus far they have added over 200,000 cars in a month. I beleive that when the faster speed comes online that they will easily complete the remaining 300,000 to 350,000 listings. Compare that to autotrader which boasts of having 1.5 million vehicles on their site within 2 years of creation. Even at the current rate of 200,000 per month 995ad.com will have 4.8 million vehicles listed within 2 years. Hmmm, sounds like success to me.
AI
