Lot Details
After interviewing 20+ dealers, we learned that our current experience wasn’t serving our audience.
Copart has traditionally been a salvage focused car business. However, salvage cars sell for significantly less than clean-titled, driveable cars. "Pre-bids" placed on our Lot Details page make up 80% of the final sale price. If we can enhance the dealer experience before the live auction, we can increase the average sale price of clean-titled cars and unlock the dealer market.
Arbitration. Dealers didn't have a lot of confidence that if the car they bought didn't meet their expectations, that it would be easy to resolve.
Vehicle History. While we did provide access to the vehicle's history, the history was limited and often took several clicks to get to the "meat" of the information. This caused dealers to think we were purposefully hiding information.
Images. While other buyers don't prioritize vehicle photos, dealers do. (Who cares what the car looks like if I'm melting it down?) The default photo quality was SD, and damage was not marked on the photos even if it was present.
Eligibility. As you could imagine, buying vehicles online can be complicated. From the documentation that we need to prevent fraud, to the legal requirements in each state, eligibility can be very confusing to users.
Hidden Information. In our interviews, many of our users requested information that we already displayed. This led us to believe that we may need to present the information in a different way.
Clear, Apparent Rules on Arbitration. We decided to display the condition of each vehicle clearly on the page, its definition and the nitty-gritty details on arbitration on every single lot page.
Clearer History While we offered history reports, it was mostly through 3rd parties and referenced with confusing, non-standard terminology. We completely rethought the terminology and decided to display the most important aspects of the history on the page.
High Quality Images on Load We implemented a system where HD images would be the default on load.
Better insights on Eligibility Right before this project, we released updated error messages surrounding buying eligibility. But for this project, we made sure that the user's eligibility loaded on page load without them having to click anything.
Better Information Architecture While we had access to the information that dealers wanted to see, we weren't showing them in the right places. We implemeted a structure to adhere to for the lot pages.
Historically, Copart has made a name for themselves in the salvage market. However, there's a lot of untapped potential in the dealer space. Dealers are primarily looking to resell vehicles, which is vastly different than our existing audience who are looking to take apart vehicles and sell the parts. While we've understood the salvage buyer very well, we realized that we didn't understand the way that dealers bought at all.
Before starting this project at all, we interviewed 20+ dealers and compiled their feedback. What they told us reshaped the way we thought about dealers:
Their entire goal is to determine how much it would cost them to fix up a car to a buyer. At a minimum, the car has to drive, have keys, and a clean title. Secondly, the dealer has to figure out what exactly the damage is, if it matches with the information displayed, and how much that damage was going to cost. Thirdly, the dealer has to assess how much they can get for the car.
Documenting the pre-bidding process and all the possible avenues to the Lot Details page.
Knowing this information, we had one of our more mechanically-inclined team members play the role of a dealer on our site. We had them try to go through one of our sale lists and determine which cars they would place a bid on. In doing this exercise, we identified a lot of the friction-points that needed to be resolved. Just going through 100 cars took several hours, and each car had at least 2 tabs that they had to open for each car.
Too much information is no information, as conveyed in the Paradox of Choice. Many of the decisions that were made on the page weren't driven by data or user feedback, so we tried to remove all information that wasn't leading users to bid.
On this page, every bit of space is valuable real-estate. We decided to remove all advertisements, as they were distracting users from bidding and causing them to bounce from the page. We also removed all duplicate information, as that would cut down on the user's processing time. We also removed the vehicle alerts section after digging in and finding out that that widget only contributed to 1% of total alerts set up. While shipping is important, it felt disconnected so we decided to move it closer to the bidding box.
We also decided to remove the links at the bottom of the page, as we didn't want to provide any avenue for the user to bounce off of the page.
After conducting our user interviews, it was clear that vehicle history played a major role in a dealer's decision. We had bits and pieces of historical information scattered around the page, but we took this opportunity to put them all in one place, showcasing the most important information on the main page.
To try and earn our user's trust back, we decided to offer free Copart Inspections for these types of vehicles, while also displaying the vehicle's history from other trusted sources.
When dealers are combing through vehicles, as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. If our inspectors say the engine works, they want to see the engine working. The more pictures, the more trust the user has.
We implemented a feature that would allow for users to be able to zoom in to twice the original image. High-quality images would be the default also, and not something the user has to select. This makes it so the user will be able to properly assess damage (and it doesn't look like we're trying to hid anything).
In addition, if we received data that there was damage on the vehicle, we associated the damage with the correct photo.
After interviewing with our dealers, we found out that a clearly outlined arbitration policy that would protect them was extremely important. Without it, dealers didn't feel comfortable buying through us.
Dealers also greatly trust the AutoGrade score when it comes to the condition of a vehicle. We decided to put all of this in one box on every lot page to reinforce trust.
While we've seen some intial positive trends for the average sale price, we can't be certain how much the design of the page has impacted this number just yet. The sample size is small, so we'll need a few months of data (we have 2) to rule out any other variables. However, this is a major first step into unlocking the dealer market and gaining back user trust which will be crucial for our business moving forward.