Whatever Happened To Disintermediation?
from the the-human-touch dept
At the end of last year, I bought a new car using the internet. After doing a ton of research, I figured out what I wanted. I then I went to just about every one of those car buying services and filled out their forms. I got back a number of different offers with wildly varying prices. Since the best deal was pretty far away, I sent it to the dealers who were nearby, one of whom agreed to meet it, and voila, I had a car for a great price. I've recommended the same process to a number of other people. However, it seems it doesn't work for everyone. Hal Plotkin's latest column talks about how awful those car buying services are, based on the single datapoint of a bad experience that he and his wife had. He blames tech companies for being managed by engineers who don't understand the human factors in how businesses work. He thinks that tech companies need to hire more "soft" skilled people who can understand people. That may or may not be true, but it seems like a stretch to say that car buying services are failures because they don't understand people.
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www.carsdirect.com
Any others?
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But in any case, I found edmunds.com to be a great resource for car shopping.
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