AM Awards 2017: Best dealer website

Carshop designed its latest website specifically for mobile, following analysis of market trends in the growth of visitors using mobile devices.

The in-house design process started with extensive research, analysis, user experience testing and competitor benchmarking. Throughout the design phase, CarShop was guided by the principle that ‘mobile-first means content first’ – avoiding any temptation to introduce clutter, unnecessary features and wordy copy.

It created a user experience that aligns to its brand identity, while delivering “a delightful, fully transparent car-buying experience”.

CarShop made imagery central to its online merchandising strategy. Each vehicle is shown with two 360-degree spins, one with the doors open and one closed, along with more than 20 images of the interior and the vehicle’s top features.

Since the redesign, visitors spend an average 30 seconds more viewing ‘vehicle detail pages’.

New features to improve engagement include save to shortlist, car finance sliders that let the user assess affordability, recently viewed vehicles, saved searches, a live chat function linked to CarShop’s customer contact centre, and the ability to pay online a refundable £99 payment that places a vehicle on hold for up to five days.

Experian supports a calculator that shows customers how likely their finance application is to be approved. CarShop’s website also provides part-exchange valuations.

Leo Nelson, marketing and IT director, said in the submission that “the ability to measure visitor behaviour and events at a granular level and capture valuable customer data and push it into our in-house CRM system” was integral to the redesign.

CarShop has partnered with Qubit, using its customer segmentation technology, which allows the testing of multiple variants of webpages or features to a segmented group of visitors, to ensure any changes planned are data-driven.