User Testing our Private Car Classifieds

[kingr]

Hi all,

We're in the process of doing final user testing on our new private car classifieds and I would like to ask anyone who is keen to do some user testing for us and share your thoughts/feedback.

Here's the testing site with dummy data.

https://staging.wheelindex.co.za/shop-cars-forsale

It would be great if you can:
1) Sign Up and Post a car advert
2) Edit the listing
3) Search for cars
4) Share your criticism and feedback

All testers will get credited with x3 Car Book Value and VIN Number check reports valid until the end of this week.

Here's some credit/debit cards for testing if you want to post a paid listing:

VISA
Number: 4012888888881881 or 4111111111111111
Expiry: Any future date
Verification: 123

MASTER
Number: 5105105105105100
Expiry: Any future date
Verification: 123

Thanks!

 

[husaindindar]

Hi,


Link not working.
Is it just me?

 

[SubLoaded]

503 error when using the above URL

 

[NtandoN]

Yep, link doesn't work. Do I still get my credits? :fencelook:

 

[kingr]

Hi all, our testing server went down.

It's now been restored, please proceed to test thank you.

 

[zaleonardz]

Credit card not working on Book Value check

 

[kingr]

Did you load a private Car Advert? That's what we would like to test

Once you post an advert your profile will be credited with x3 book value and vin number reports. You do not need to use a card to create these reports and can instead use the credits assigned to you.

---

@NtandoN your credits will be assigned to your profile that you used to sign up, please try now.

 

[husaindindar]

So far everything was fine apart from the download report on the vin report.


error:

This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.

<Error>
<Code>AccessDenied</Code>
<Message>Access Denied</Message>
<RequestId>007C79AABEE37FED</RequestId>
<HostId>
hh3X/u2pc6tUWrW+ojqmZOH0U6LIyfTlc4xiBa+Q+BTrV8vxCFeMF3jfwyZjjlIXKNkvbRJbd2E=
</HostId>
</Error>

 

[kingr]

Please send me the VIN to have a look for you.

 

[NtandoN]

FEEDBACK
Cool platform :bravo:
I like that it gives the retail price of the vehicle and pulls a VIN report. However, I don't understand how "great deal, good deal, fair deal & high price" tags are calculated. What is this based on?

Example:
Vehicle 1: R5,000 below retail is tagged as "high price"
Vehicle 2: R107,700 above retail is tagged as "fair deal"

I understand this may be due to the type of vehicle but was still left confused.

Everything else is great IMHO. Thanks for the credits :smilebounce:

 

[kingr]

Thanks for the feedback.

Our "deal rating" algorithm is basically v1 and we need to improve this as we go along. So how to calculate the deal of a car right now is by taking into account all the user-supplied data about the car and then assign each value a score. Example, cars with a maintenance plan will have a higher score vs a car with a service plan. A car with no service history will have a lower score vs one with service history. We then take into account the asking and compare this to the retail value, we then assign a score to the asking price. Then the reason, why you see those discrepancies, is because a car can be priced extremely low, but it has no service history, spare key, service book and service plan it's pretty much a minefield and the potential new owner then need to rely on he's expertise or others to validate that the car is a good deal.

Also if the seller supplies a VIN, we can check the accident/repair history and apply this to the score of the car. The seller with no accident history benefit greatly from this as their score will be much higher, we do not penalize less than x3 accidents severely because someone can just nick you from the back and bam R30k damage to your car as I experienced with my 1-Series.

Also, the retail price of a car is R1M, asking R100k below retail is likely the trade-in value of that and would be considered a "fair deal" to start with.

Over time this "deal rating" algorithm will become self-learning. It will be able to know that a Honda S2000 advertised at R120k above retail with FSH is in-fact a "good" deal because there are not many on the market and the avg car does indeed fetch "R120k" above retail. The challenge is that there are out-lier cases of cars that sell way below and way above retail and currently we do not have enough data to know which these cars are besides inputting them manually. In tech terms, this "deal rating" algorithm will become a neural network where it can detect patterns etc...We will also start recording actual sale price data from the owners. We can then cross-match this with the retail price and assign a better label.

The point of all of this is that we want to help buyer and sellers understand if they are getting a good deal or not by using data to determine these suggestions. Work in progress

 

[Rory]

Looks like you're off to a really good start. Didn't get to play much before "AdBlocker detected" kicked in though. I don't white list any site. uBlock origin also seems to block your pictures.

The drop downs are a bit basic. Some competitor sites have awesome graphs that help you narrow down things a bit more intelligently, but you kinda have to have a good few thousand listings for that to help at all. I also wouldn't show brands/models etc that you have no listings for. I haven't even heard of a few of those... It's a bit buggy when you click "Add Car" a few times. Like after you click it the make/model drop dropdowns reset but the model dropdown is still filtered to the make. You can click "Add Car" without anything selected etc.

The alignment is a bit weird on some of the search fields, with the text aligned to the right on Accident History/Colors. I would probably lose the "radio buttons" there and just style the options nicely and indicate which one is selected.
You top price bracket hopefully has an extra 0

The "flash" you get when navigating isn't very nice. It's cool that its quick due to React but the footer doesn't stick to the bottom of the page when there's not enough content to fill the height of the screen. Just needs some CSS tweaking there. I see "sometimes" there's a loading animation (navigating between pages within "shop") and sometimes there isn't (navigating to other sections, going from shop to a listing), just white.

I see you're using Cloudinary. While they do have some cool features for image management, resizing etc I think you might find that using them as a CDN on a public facing, image heavy site can get very expensive very quickly.

There's a few credentials exposed in your code the way things have currently been implemented.

Some things I think would make this site better than some others is the ability to search by kW, kW/ton or 0-100 or something.
Something else that would be handy is showing me what features are "standard" on a particular vehicle, and which are optional. You might even need a third thing there like standard on the base model, included in particular model, and optional extras.

 

[billionairebum]

Done. billionairebum1 (the first one did not send an email through checked all folders). Looks great. It would be nice to have a save button when editing the cars on each page to avoid going through 4-5 pages clicking next.

 

[Twinz]

This is a very cool idea:bravo:

 

[kingr]

Hi all, thank you for all the testing and feedback.

@Rory I appreciate the level of detail with your suggestions and will definitely look the feasibility of running Cloudinday long term.

For now, there's been no "show stopper" bugs and will be deploying the classifieds this week.

 

[VinceM]

Hi,

Were all "testing" ads removed?

https://staging.wheelindex.co.za/shop-cars-forsale/bmw/bmw_3-series/335i_at/5d9dab42465a9f4e7530912e

This looks like an M3, yet the ad is for 335i

 

[kingr]

no, all testing ads are still up. Some ads do not match the descriptions, this ok for testing.

 

[kingr]

We've launched to production. You are welcome to list your car for sale on our website.

https://www.wheelindex.co.za/shop-cars-forsale