http://arti.motomaniac.info/ Articles at Moto Articles en-us http://arti.motomaniac.info/cars-and-trucks/market-analysis-of-online-car-sales-in-australia.html http://arti.motomaniac.info/cars-and-trucks/market-analysis-of-online-car-sales-in-australia.html Tue, 08 May 2012 02:21:24 +0200
CarSales.com Limited - carsales.com.au

The undisputed leader in selling used cars online boasting more than 200,000 cars for sale is carsales.com Limited, but when you look at it closely their website reveals that more than 65% (145,000) of their car listings are provided by commercial car dealerships throughout Australia. This is great for people that don't want to do the typical visit to car yards to look at cars in person, but ultimately means that if you want to find a car for sale by a private individual you'll need to look beyond the flood of dealer listings.

How up to date these listings are is also questionable with a quick ring around revealing that several dealership cars were no longer available. We were, however, assured that similar stock would be coming in shortly.

News Limited - carsguide.com.au

Marketing efforts by the News Limited giant is attempting to place CarsGuide in the mind of Australians that they are the number two in online car sales, however from an inventory perspective this is not the case and their proportion of private to dealer cars is worse than that of CarSales.com Limited. CarsGuide.com.au lists more than 125,000 cars on their website, however only 12,000 of these are listings by private individuals which equates to more than 90% of their online stock coming from car dealerships. The same stock that is listed on CarSales.

Recent marketing efforts by CarsGuide declares themselves as being the "smart place" to sell your car online, with a strong emphasis towards the private seller market. Whether they will succeed in improving their ratio of dealer cars versus private cars is yet to be seen. Instilling in people that they are "stupid" if they don't advertise on my site is not the marketing angle I would have chosen, but time will tell.

Given the similar numbers of cars from dealerships between CarsGuide and CarSales we can assume that they have very similar dealer inventory. Therefore if you were looking for a new or used car from a dealership than it wouldn't matter if you choose one site or the other as they essentially contain the same database of cars from dealerships throughout Australia.

Telstra - tradingpost.com.au

Despite clear SEO techniques and traditional marketing adopted by Telstra, their market penetration in the private seller space continues to struggle despite the Trading Post's long history of being the place to buy and sell from private individuals dating back several decades - well before the internet was mainstream.

A search for "all cars" on their website reveals in excess of 110,000 results, however, when you look closely more than 83,500 of these listings are from car dealerships making up 85% of their online inventory. Unfortunately for TradingPost their online inventory makes it clear that they are a long way behind CarSales and CarsGuide, despite what they're marketing attempts to portray.

eBay Motors - cars.ebay.com.au

eBay is an intriguing competitor because they have taken a similar approach to Telstra by denying users the ability to remove dealer cars from search results until after the initial results are given- where advanced refining options are then revealed. A quick analysis is all that's required here because eBay Motors Australia only has a little over 17,000 cars listed for sale, 11,000 of which are from dealers, and just 6,000 from private sellers. Whilst their ratio between dealer and private listings is similar to CarSales at 65%, the lacking number of listings does not demonstrate eBay as a one stop shop when it comes to buying cars online in Australia.

eBay - Gumtree.com.au

The reason eBay is intriguing in this market is because they purchased a well known free private listings website known as "Gumtree.com.au" quite some time ago, which is exceptionally popular in regional areas throughout Australia. What makes Gumtree unique compared to the aforementioned websites is that it does not list car dealership vehicles and is 100% private seller cars only and contains an inventory of over 60,000 private cars for sale. This puts it ahead of everyone else for private car listings including being marginally ahead of the believed market leader CarSales.com.au.

However, the biggest question that remains is why did eBay purchase Gumtree.com.au when it is a completely free website with no charge for listings; a stark contrast to eBay's traditional pricing model on the well known auction website eBay.com.au. Perhaps eBay considered Gumtree‘s market dominance a threat to eBay's ongoing success in Australia and purchased it to protect their interests? If that is the case one would conclude that Gumtree will not remain a free website for the foreseeable future. ]]> http://arti.motomaniac.info/cars-and-trucks/a-driven-market-is-heating-up-within-car-sales-australia.html http://arti.motomaniac.info/cars-and-trucks/a-driven-market-is-heating-up-within-car-sales-australia.html Mon, 23 Apr 2012 03:01:41 +0200
The online car sales market in Australia has been dominated by CarSales.com.au for the last fifteen years however new players in the market are pushing hard to fight for a share of the market.

However any effort to compete may be in vain as one of the biggest challenges for other used car sales related websites is to appear in search enginge result pages (SERP) for the search terms "car sales" and "used cars". There is a distinct advantage to the domain name CarSales.com as it naturally dominates search engine results for the search query "car sales", yet there is some variation in SERP position for the next most popular search query "used cars".

The TradingPost.com.au has recently made a significant effort to compete with the search term "used cars" with SEO optimization techniques as their website has been on the first page of search queries in recent months. It has began appearing as the number 1 result for the Australian version of Google (www.google.com.au) lately, and is rotating it's position with the otherwise dominant CarSales.com.au.

Another competitor in the space is CarsGuide.com.au, which is part of News Limited. They have recently taken a different approach to compete with CarSales.com.au by swamping traditional media such as radio and billboards with messages similar to marketing themselves as "the smart choice for selling your car online". A commentators in the industry suggested that CarsGuide are attempting to establish themselves as the "Number 2" in the industry and have accepted the premise that beating CarSales off their top podium position is an impossibility.

Perhaps such an assumption narrow minded since CarsGuide is a News Limited entity which has tremendous resources at it's disposal. Afterall, News Limited is one of Australia's largest media conglomerate companies, employing more than 8,000 staff nationwide and approximately 3,000 journalists. The publicly listed company's interests span newspaper and magazine publishing, Internet, Pay TV, National Rugby League, market research, DVD and film distribution, and film and television production trading assets.

Nonetheless, CarSales announced in their end of Financial Year 2011 Report that Profit was up 35% from the previous financial year to $58.3m after tax. Who would have thought that a website dedicated to facilating the selling of vehicles in Australia would be so profitable? Being a public listed company offers transparency to competitors and may inevitably drive those competitors to the beleif that competing is worthwhile.

Meanwhile, there are a number of other sizeable corporations competiting as well, including eBay with their "Motors" section in combination with the eBay owned company Gumtree.com.au.

A striking difference between CarSales and it's competitors, is that CarSales is the most expensive option to list your car for sale in Australia. A direct approach taken by CarsGuide is to simply offer listings for "half the price" at $30 versus $60, however is listing on CarsGuide at least half the value? If we take a look at the "Private Cars for Sale" on CarsGuide, the number of cars listed as at 9th April 2012 is not even close to half with just 12,112 versus 72,819 on CarSales. On these metrics alone it would appear that 16% of the cost compared to CarSales comes to less than $10, so it really does not appear to be good value for money. Of course, the true value for money comes from the number of potential buyers, however these types of metrics are not publicly disclosed.

In contrast, what if we were to analyze the FREE market of online car sales in Australia, is it possible that there is some value there instead? Thankfully for many faithful users of Gumtree it continues to be a free option available despite it's ownership by eBay and it boasts 63,246 cars for sale at the same date. While these numbers appear to be similar to CarSales, the downside however is that Gumtree seems to have significant regional popularity and lacks market penetration in the capital cities throughout Australia. For example, there are only 4,443 cars listed in Brisbane versus 16,341, so the largest population market is still clearly dominated by CarSales.

A surprise competitor in the free Boost Classifieds - Car Sales category which boasts 8,615 Private Used Cars listed in Brisbane, which is obviously significant value for money since it is absolutely free.

With such fantastic free options available we're led to question why people continue to pay to sell their cars online? The simple reasoning is the lack of marketing, while CarsGuide, TradingPost and CarSales can afford to help convince the public that paying to sell their car on their sites is good value for money, the truth is that even selling one of your greatest assets online can be acheived without cost. ]]>