The revised Auto Trader search box and menus
We’ve made a series of changes to the new Auto Trader website today in response to the large amount of feedback we’ve had in the past few months.
Here’s a quick guide to how the site has changed.
E-Marketing Manager Ian MacDonald explains the changes to the search system:
“We have made some significant improvements to the website today as a result of constructive feedback posted here and elsewhere.
“Search functionality has returned to a more traditional drop down style (both simple and advanced search) and results are now presented in a more simplified way, which should speed up the process of searching.
“We are listening to every piece of feedback and whilst we cannot post answers here to every comment, we urge our most loyal customers who use this blog to continue providing constructive comments to help us best address your concerns.”
The menus at the top of the page have been changed and now contain fewer options. This allows them to load more quickly and should make it easier for you to navigate.
You will also see a “Safety and Security centre” link at the top-right of the home page where you can find information on how to avoid common car buying and selling scams.
We will continue to read your feedback on the new site and use it to make further improvements. Please give the updated site a try and let us know what you think of it in the comments below. Please also mention what browser you use to visit Auto Trader.
Keith Collantine
Auto Trader Blog RSS Feed
Autotrader you are lying to the consumer, promising a fresh new website when in fact you are offering some second rate, worthless piece of software. You cant open images, you can’t see the car details, you can’t pretty much do anything.
SORT IT OUT
You must of lost so much business over this its so simple as everyone keeps saying, just go back to the old format, update it maybe but at least it works in the first place. How long has everyone been saying this and why have you stopped listening, could it possibly be the fact you gain alot of money anyway from those hundreds of stupid and irrelevant ads that float, whizz or flash all over the screen.
Ultimately we are the ones who give you the most revenue in car ads and you would be absolutely stuffed if another company offered a better service because lets face it your crap!
Just what I was searching for! I was researching articles for our website when I came across your post (on Changes to Auto Trader car search and menus Auto Trader Blog) which I noticed on Bing. We would love you to write for us, if curious. I’ve bookmarked this post for future reference. Nice comments here as well – Cheers from E-Commerce Guidebook
Hi all,
The latest Auto Trader update can be found here:
http://autotraderblog.co.uk/2010/02/11/lost-keys-and-site-improvements/
the new site is so slow its unbelievable when opening the pitcures. It gets to the point wehere user wants to just give up and look at some other site. You never had this issue with the old site, new site layout i smuch better. However you’ll need to improve the photo issue very soon, or face losing alot f potential customers.
To market in terms of quality rather than price, and in order to differentiate accordingly, you need to follow the standard format of the 4 P’s marketing plan. That is, Price, Product, Place and Promotion – obviously you know the main attributes of the product, and the price, but for ‘place’ you should think about the type of people who are willing to pay over 4x price of competing product – whereas the cheap option may be sold where emphasis is on cost, your product will be suited to places/distributors where the customers will be willing to pay for quality. Thank you for this article! I’ve just found a certainly wonderful site about panda marketing Try it!
Using a netbook with firefox v3.5.6 and it grinds to a halt when scrolling down a list of search results on the autotrader website. It’s become too painfully slow to use.
I question how many people were using the beta version when it was on trial, I know I always reverted to the old version because it was way better. It just needed a few tweaks to speed it up a little.
THE NEW AUTOTRADER WEBSITE IS VERY POOR , VERY SLOW , NO CARS FOR SALE . LOSING MILLIONS OF CUSTOMERS DAY BY DAY . .BYE AUTOTRADER SEE U WHEN U GET BETTER , IF U CAN !
Hi , James you have a very good point , yes the new website is pants and i actually went on today and only found 1 black bmw 3 series in the whole of the u.k – WOW THATS VERY BAD! I was expecting to see at least 200-300 at least , but if it was the old website which was extremley good and useful there would of been alot. p.s the new website is NOT user friendly so BEWARE GUYS !
What irritates me is the fact that advertisements are clearly considered number one priority on the website. They are everywhere!
You are getting there slowly.
The return to proper dropdowns is welcome, and the coding is clearly better overall as I am now not getting javascipt error messages every time I load the page.
In terms of loading speed, this is also better as you no longer have to wait for all the millions of third party ads to load before actually searching for cars so at least I can ignore them now and concentrate on using the core purpose of the site which is finding cars – having said that, and I hope it was just someone playing about, but last night i was getting floating 3rd party ads appearing over the car search results (and the close advert link didn’t work by the way) – if anyone at autotrader is thinking of implementing these floating ads, DON’T – I still don’t think you have the first idea how much you have alienated both visitors and car advertisers and it will take many months of reliable, quick website use before you are trusted again, and floating ads will just kill the site completely.
In terms of the search dropdowns, I fail to see why the use of light blue is seen as essential as it’s harder to read than good old black which is used for the number of cars returned count anyway, and I don’t think the use of black on the dropdown text would detract from the look too much – equally on the search results themselves, the light grey used is quite hard to read, and would again be better in black, or in a darker shade of grey or in bold instead.
On the individual car results page, the biggest change I would like to see is the return of the associated vehicle list to the right of the page as although the list has been moved up the page in the current format, it is still off screen when the page initially loads, and as a result the response rate from associated vehicles has dropped right off – of course getting rid of the seemingly all important 3rd party banner ad from the top of the page would help this but I’m not holding my breath on that one.