F***ing Auto Trader website!!

F***ing Auto Trader website!!

Author
Discussion

kentmotorcompany

2,471 posts

211 months

Friday 24th October 2008
quotequote all
I have just emailed a link if this thread to AT.

I for one am very concerned if the buying public are not happy with the system I pay towards, for advertising my cars.

Autotrader is the biggest website for used cars, and should be the very best it can.

I think part of the problem is, they seem to have built it with too much emphasis on selling us traders upgrades on our ads, rather than having a good reliable system.

I'll post back if I get any sort of response.

Beefmeister

Original Poster:

16,482 posts

231 months

Friday 24th October 2008
quotequote all
kentmotorcompany said:
I have just emailed a link if this thread to AT.

I for one am very concerned if the buying public are not happy with the system I pay towards, for advertising my cars.

Autotrader is the biggest website for used cars, and should be the very best it can.

I think part of the problem is, they seem to have built it with too much emphasis on selling us traders upgrades on our ads, rather than having a good reliable system.

I'll post back if I get any sort of response.
To be honest if you get a response, when I and a few others haven't, it just proves the point that they only give a monkey's about their traders, not the public sellers...

rage

richyb

4,615 posts

211 months

Friday 24th October 2008
quotequote all
Only noticed it in the last few days. I use firefox and it just stops responding after you click a few of the drop down boxes.

carmonk

7,910 posts

188 months

Friday 24th October 2008
quotequote all
2fster said:
carmonk said:
The way around it is to click on the "show results" button - or whatever it's called - immediately you make any change
So, don't make all your changes in one go, select them one by one, pressing 'Show Results' inbetween each change?
If you don't want it to crash, yes

2fster

2,422 posts

227 months

Friday 24th October 2008
quotequote all
carmonk said:
2fster said:
carmonk said:
The way around it is to click on the "show results" button - or whatever it's called - immediately you make any change
So, don't make all your changes in one go, select them one by one, pressing 'Show Results' inbetween each change?
If you don't want it to crash, yes
Cheers.

I wasn't being funny by the way, just wanted to check I'd read you right.

It's rubbish isn't it if you've got to go through that palaver?

internet-carlot

499 posts

190 months

Friday 24th October 2008
quotequote all
Beefmeister said:
internet-carlot said:
The move to the new style has longer term implications for future developments (or so my rep told me!!).

For example, some of you may have noticed that some dealers (me for one) have gone to a new bolder listing style. Part of that package is when you click into one of my cars, a selection of smilar models is displayed to the left. The new system is utilised to make that happen.

I hear what a lot of you are saying but I know of one customer who bought a car he had never thought of (Saab 9-3 sport saloon diesel from a 318i) because of his selection method.
Don't get me wrong, i have no issues with the actual search style - i think that its a good system. Its the web developer that i have an issue with - their program is hanging people's browsers country-wide, and that's just not acceptable.

I've emailed them 3 or 4 times, even sent the link to this thread, and nothing back from them.

Its just bad customer service, plain and simple.
I see, fair point.

Gompo

4,415 posts

259 months

Friday 24th October 2008
quotequote all
There was a period of maybe a month where you could choose what era of a particular model of car you searched for, so you could just get E30 BMW up or whatever (it was defined by year I think). This was great, although obviously somebody didnt like it..?

On the older site you could also do a sort of wildcard entry in the keyword search, so if you put in '197*', you'd get all the 1970-1979 cars and of course a telephone matches.

...I guess it's not really made for people buying or selling the more obscure sort of car, but it's a shame you cant do the above anymore.

carmonk

7,910 posts

188 months

Saturday 25th October 2008
quotequote all
2fster said:
carmonk said:
2fster said:
carmonk said:
The way around it is to click on the "show results" button - or whatever it's called - immediately you make any change
So, don't make all your changes in one go, select them one by one, pressing 'Show Results' inbetween each change?
If you don't want it to crash, yes
Cheers.

I wasn't being funny by the way, just wanted to check I'd read you right.

It's rubbish isn't it if you've got to go through that palaver?
Rubbish indeed. As a part-time web developer I'm just trying to keep calm...

insideout

40 posts

190 months

Sunday 26th October 2008
quotequote all

Have to agree with the many comments. I find the site very frustrating to use!

The most annoying thing by far though is the inability to save bookmarks! When you do, they only work for a day or two and then I'll either get an error or an entirely different car model! Would be grateful if someone developed a screen scraping website to make the interface a bit more useful!

Zahoor

Beefmeister

Original Poster:

16,482 posts

231 months

Wednesday 29th October 2008
quotequote all
So has anyone had a response from AT if you emailed them?

I've not, and thats just unbelievably bad customer service.

If there were another option, i'd use it. But i guess they know that...

richyb

4,615 posts

211 months

Wednesday 29th October 2008
quotequote all
The site seems to be working fine again now. I used it for about 30 mins last night without issue.

onlynik

3,978 posts

194 months

Wednesday 29th October 2008
quotequote all
It never works well in Firefox for me, always have to use IE.

shadowninja

76,386 posts

283 months

Wednesday 29th October 2008
quotequote all
It's a lottery really. One where there are no prizes, just pain. I'm not sure that is the intention of their marketing department. biggrin

Edited by shadowninja on Wednesday 29th October 11:24

kentmotorcompany

2,471 posts

211 months

Wednesday 29th October 2008
quotequote all
Sorry, forgot all about this thread. I did get a call yesterday. I was driving so I dont remember many of the details. A web devolpment manager or similar postion person called me to say that my comments were a real concern, and were being reveiwed at the highest level.

Whilst he didnt make to much commitment in terms of exactly what would happen, I did get the impression they were genuinly concerned about it.

timewatch

881 posts

195 months

Thursday 30th October 2008
quotequote all
Yes how the new Autotrader site works is crap !

I have already made this complaint to them back in July, but I do believe that Pistonheads is now owned by them ?

So if that's the case and someone from Autotrader/Pistonheads is reading this ?

AUTOTRADER SITE both uploading and the search prompt are 5H1T ok, go back to the old one it was much better.

TW>>>

Beefmeister

Original Poster:

16,482 posts

231 months

Thursday 30th October 2008
quotequote all
kentmotorcompany said:
Sorry, forgot all about this thread. I did get a call yesterday. I was driving so I dont remember many of the details. A web devolpment manager or similar postion person called me to say that my comments were a real concern, and were being reveiwed at the highest level.

Whilst he didnt make to much commitment in terms of exactly what would happen, I did get the impression they were genuinly concerned about it.
Hmmm, as good as it is that you got a response, it just shows that they couldn't give two hoots about the 'ordinary' users, just their traders...

AutoTrader2008

1 posts

186 months

Wednesday 19th November 2008
quotequote all
A MESSAGE FROM THE AUTO TRADER TEAM

We have been reading your comments with interest and would firstly like to thank you for your ongoing use and support of autotrader.co.uk.

Several customers have alerted us to the issue that the Auto Trader website has been causing their Internet browser to crash and we would like to reassure everyone that we take all technical issues extremely seriously and endeavour to resolve them as quickly as possible.

We have identified the problem which is impairing the usability of autotrader.co.uk. We are working hard to resolve this issue and will keep you updated as to the progress of this.

We regularly collect feedback from customers and read the forums and blogs which mention Auto Trader. We then use all of the information as constructive input into future developments.

In the meantime, if you do experience any further technical issues or have any queries for Auto Trader, please do email us at enquiries@autotrader.co.uk.

Many thanks,

The Auto Trader team

joncon

1,446 posts

224 months

Wednesday 19th November 2008
quotequote all
so its still not fixed then ?

Beefmeister

Original Poster:

16,482 posts

231 months

Wednesday 19th November 2008
quotequote all
AutoTrader2008 said:
A MESSAGE FROM THE AUTO TRADER TEAM

We have been reading your comments with interest and would firstly like to thank you for your ongoing use and support of autotrader.co.uk.

Several customers have alerted us to the issue that the Auto Trader website has been causing their Internet browser to crash and we would like to reassure everyone that we take all technical issues extremely seriously and endeavour to resolve them as quickly as possible.

We have identified the problem which is impairing the usability of autotrader.co.uk. We are working hard to resolve this issue and will keep you updated as to the progress of this.

We regularly collect feedback from customers and read the forums and blogs which mention Auto Trader. We then use all of the information as constructive input into future developments.

In the meantime, if you do experience any further technical issues or have any queries for Auto Trader, please do email us at enquiries@autotrader.co.uk.

Many thanks,

The Auto Trader team
Thanks for responding, look forward to the site improvements.

Actually, as you are reading this page - there a different system for a couple of days before this one came on line - it had much more model filtering, down to model variant etc, and it was really useful.

Why did it disappear for the new system to appear?

I think everyone liked it, though i appreciate its probably a lot more work for AT...

r1ch

2,873 posts

197 months

Wednesday 19th November 2008
quotequote all
I quite simply prefer the old website. I often encounter problems with the new one.