It seems like everywhere you turn, people are talking about Twitter. It’s no wonder with all the press, Twitter usage has jumped from 14 million users into 24+ million users in just a few months.

With all the buzz, it’s no surprise that a couple of classified services have also popped up on Twitter during this time. (e.g. ilist and tweba to name a couple) While Twitter is mostly used for conversations, many users on Twitter have also been selling items and asking friends to help them find good deals.

Because word-of-mouth sales and referrals is key on this particular platform, we have designed and completed our integration with Twitter so that it would be effective without being spammy. The 1-click submit is setup to work with a number of marketplaces currently on Twitter via #hashtags and our own tests have shown very positive responses from occasional postings.

As a seller, you can now test this feature in your EasyAutoSales and Twitter accounts.  Simply log in to your admin console and click on the Twitter icon next to the vehicle and submit your posting via Twitter’s web interface.

Once submitted, the classified services on Twitter will contact you within a couple of minutes with potential buyers that have expressed interest in similar vehicles in the past.

As more and more users turn to Twitter for these services, these small but quick interactions should help increase your dealership’s online presence and create more foot traffic in your stores.  Log in and check it out!  We would love to get your feedback on the new feature.

As many of you have noticed, EasyAutoSales launched our new website last week!!! This new look was months in the making and took hundreds of hours to complete. I wanted to thank everyone that were involved in the upgrade and praise those who worked the late night shifts and helped finished this 8 month project in a mere 3 and a half months.

If there’s one thing that I know we do well, it’s that we can listen and adapt quickly to the ever changing web. Is there something you’d change about our website? If so, let us know in the comments!

So what has the new look brought us? Has anything changed since the upgrade? Below are some highlights and stats from this past week.

- User engagement has already gone up 25%! Our community forums are being used and buyers are asking questions.

- User attention has also gone up! Shoppers are staying on the site longer, browsing more pages (+14%) and leads using our new form has also gone up. (+33%)

- Dealers who have upgraded their packages are seeing an increase in their traffic and leads. We have included priority placement in this new release to showcase dealers and private sellers that are paying to use or to advertise on our service. As our network of sites expand, the priority placement will be continued on to the new partner sites.

So what else is in store for us? We plan on doing a number of minor upgrade over the next few weeks and months to make sure our dealer services are comprehensive. If you have any suggestions on how we can help you sell more cars, please let us know at our suggestions board.

We are now only a couple of weeks away from launching version 3 of our website. Unfortunately with the amount of changes, fixes and upgrades we have been making, our original intent of pushing this out at the end of June has been delayed by about a month. (Hopefully that’s all though.)

The good news is that the new site will be a lot faster, more user friendly and come with a lot less bugs. In addition to some of the bigger changes we tackled, we also made tons of minor upgrades to make things run generally smoother.

The GREAT news is that we just finished a number of major sections on the website which only leaves a couple more to go. One of the sections we just completed is our new, Apple inspired Community Forums.

We are very excited about this new, upgraded section. The current forums while functional, has not been as used as much as we had originally believed it would be. Part of this reason is because it’s not apparent that it exists and we don’t do a great job of showcasing it on the website. In version 3, we are making the community Q&A discussions a bigger part of the overall EasyAutoSales shopping experience.

While car buyers and enthusiasts be able to ask questions and help each other out with car questions, car dealers are also encouraged to jump in on the discussions and help teach consumers how to buy cars. As a community, we’re hoping these personal interactions will help bury some of the negative stereotypes about dealers. Overtime, dealers that actively participate in the community will also be rewarded for their efforts.

So… thoughts on the new look?

WOW! We’ve been floored by the number of positive responses and participation from consumers to write short “tweet” like car reviews for our upcoming website. We’ve only been requesting the car review submissions for a couple of weeks and we have already received hundreds of submissions.

Here’s another sneak preview of our upcoming site and what these car reviews will look like live. I am biased but I think these reviews are damn pretty… and USEFUL! As the designer/programmer working on making this thing work, I’ve already been tuned to check out a number of models that I’ve never even considered looking at before.

What do you think? We would love to get some feedback on this and of course, your car reviews.

This month we have some very important and exciting developments!

1. It has come to our attention that SPAM and fraudulent listings are becoming a problem on the system. While we have been taking action previously from user reported listings, we will soon be able to actively remove fraudulent listings shortly after they appear even if the users don’t catch it first. Car shoppers are still recommended to report any questionable postings to us for review by flagging the users or vehicles.
2. We are also excited to be working on version 3 of our new web design! Our goal at EasyAutoSales has always been to help dealers showcase their vehicles in the best light possible. Like the earlier versions, we will provide support for unlimited, large photos and video in version 3. In addition to photos and descriptions, we have put a lot of effort into making sure the information flow on the new design makes sense. Our goal with the new design is to help educate casual shoppers and give them more information to make quicker choices. We hope this will mean more phone and email leads for the dealers.

   We should be launching the new version of the website by the end of June and we will look forward to your feedback once it’s available.

Finally, we are excited to be working on some new premium services for this website that will help dealers sell cars faster online. If your dealership currently advertise on Craigslist, we invite you to take our short 2 minute survey to let us know how we can help. Even if you don’t use Craigslist, we would love to know why.

Click Here to take survey!

Thanks!