frugal underground

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Yesterday morning, I was reading the Excess Voice newsletter by Nick Usborne. The topic of the newsletter is copywriting, of all things, but it started me down a path that had some surprising results.

In this issue, Nick was talking about the importance of being aware of new technologies and services as they relate to your business. His point was that, whether or not you choose to employ these new technologies, your competitors might, and you should be making an informed decision. To illustrate his point, he rattled off a number of interesting new technologies and examples.

One of these was MotorMapUSA.com. Nick was using it as an example of a “mashup”—two services sort of “glued” together to make a more useful service. In the case of MotorMapUSA.com, they have combined the features of eBay Motors (buying and selling vehicles via online auction) with those of Google Maps (locating things by proximity). By combining these sites, you end up with a map of vehicles listed on eBay that are near your location.

In my opinion, this is huge.

While most people haven’t used eBay yet for vehicle purchases, the numbers are starting to pick up. I think it’s going to become more and more common to shop for cars through a number of online tools, especially as these mashups make it easier. The problem with car shopping on eBay, though, is that there are tons of great deals—but most of them aren’t convenient. It’s great to find a vehicle for $1000+ below Blue Book value, but if it’s halfway across the country, then you’re going to have to figure out how to transport it, adding expense and hassle. Granted, sometimes the bargain is worth it, but most of us won’t go to the effort.

By showing only local vehicles for sale, MotorMapUSA.com eliminates that inconvenience. Since eBay Motors is still a relatively little-used shopping tool, and most people are only interested in local vehicles, you have a great advantage with the auction format: less competition. You also have the advantage of a limited time frame (rather than a seller who is glad to wait around for a higher offer). Additionally, the seller might have a different perspective than the average private party seller.

I’ll tell you what happened yesterday as an example. We’ve been saving up for a new vehicle. We have one that is seemingly always on its last legs, so we wanted to be prepared if it suddenly died. We also need a different type of vehicle—last summer we had our properly-installed bike roof rack fly off our car, complete with two spendy bikes. So we wanted either a little pickup truck or a minivan that can carry our bikes securely (we bike a whole lot).

While I was checking out MotorMapUSA.com (just because it sounded like a great idea), I saw a few trucks listed. I looked at them out of curiosity, and found one that was particularly interesting. It had all of the features we wanted (4-wheel drive, a small extended cab to haul passengers in a pinch, not overly large) and the current high bid was significantly below what we had been considering paying for a vehicle. It also only had four hours left on the auction.

I thought, “What the heck?” and called Daniel. The listing had many pictures, so we both looked them over. We could see from the listing that the seller was a local new car dealership. Daniel called them to ask a few questions, and it turned out that it was a trade-in on a new Volvo, and the dealer mostly just wanted to move it. I’m guessing that for a new car dealership, it is much easier and less resource-intensive to sell the trade-ins on eBay than to run a used car lot or farm it out to other dealers.

Since the truck was just a few miles away, I went to look at it. It had been accurately described on the listing (this didn’t surprise me since the seller had lots of great ratings) so there weren’t any surprises, but it was nice to look it over and feel confident—I was able to check things like even tire wear, look for any engine compartment leaks, smell the interior, that kind of thing.

I came home, studied the Blue Book values more carefully, and talked to Daniel some more. We decided to bid on it, and set our maximum bid at about $800 under Blue Book (we wanted a bargain, after all!). I’m not a “professional eBayer” so I didn’t attempt to do any bidding tricks, like waiting until the last minute; I just put the max bid in and let it go.

It’s kind of odd to sit and think, “I might be buying a truck today.” But when the auction ended, we had won it for about $200 under our maximum bid (sales tax came to just about $200, though). We started the transfer of the savings money from HSBC, went down to the dealership, signed all the papers, wrote them a check (that was convenient, since most private party sellers want cash—a little tricky since all of our bank accounts are with Internet banks and we usually keep the maximum daily ATM withdrawal limit low for security), and drove home with our new truck.

Could we have gotten a better deal by scouring the local papers and looking at a bunch of vehicles over the course of several months? I’m sure we could have. But this was definitely a case of a “convenient bargain.” The shopping process took a grand total of four hours, most of them passive, and we got a good vehicle for less than it is worth.

Like everything else, you have to weigh your priorities: are you more interested in spending the time to save the money? Or spending the money to save the time? We felt like this was a great compromise between the two, and I’ll be recommending the MotorMapUSA.com service to anyone who’s car shopping.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 28th, 2006 at 11:12 am and is tagged bargains, cars, internet, shopping. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.