It is a pretty hectic period of my life. I did not believe it before. They say you get health problems when you over work yourself. Now I see it. First I started grinding my teeth and had to get a night guard. Then I started having problems with my back. I started going to the chiropractor frequently. I got headaches. It is something. I am really hoping this is going to be over soon. I want to go back to a less stressful life style.
Google is causing part of this stress. They keep on changing their algorithm. At one point we were as high as #26 for dealer software. Then we started slipping slowly. No matter what I do, it does not seem to be putting us back to where we were. I put 5 videos on Youtube. I changed the link from our websites to our website to use random terms. I think Google punishes your site if all links use the same text. The reason is said to be "unnatural link patterns". That did not seem to help. Then I added an article on ezine called how to select dealer management software. I even created a new website from scratch: auto dealer management software. I am pretty proud of the design by the way. Well, long story short, we are at #52 as of this writing. I am at the end of my rope. Nothing I do seem to pull us up. Meanwhile, quite a few of our competitors continue to go up - arrgh. SEO is so frustrating sometimes. Obviously I will continue to try but I need to give a break and work on client requests.
There are some good changes. It is now possible to use multiple parts in a reconditioning work. There is an explanation balloon about SSL in client sites forms. You can add additional emails for a contact form. Some new fields added for parts. Clients can actually add custom vehicle fields in Carsinia. Credit application form creates the new lead in the back end automatically. I am planning to do an export utility this weekend. All good stuff.
I organized the projects into a few buckets. Expectedly, the biggest bucket is in dealer wizard and websites. Ebay has quite a bit left to do as well. Still, I feel better now that I see less items - about 10-15 buckets rather than a huge pile.
There are 3 big projects outstanding: Route One or Dealer track integration, book values and 2 key forms in vehicle sales. Our biggest client wants to send credit apps to Wells Fargo through RouteOne or Dealer Track. So far, neither has been responsive. Book values will require buying a new product called book link from Chrome. Not to mention the significant development needed after that. Finally, we have 2 key forms we need to have: bankers contract and purchase retail agreement. We are researching to see where we can get these forms.
Saturday, February 12, 2011
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Dealer Software for eBay Motors
This has been on my plate for a very long time - probably close to 8 months. Finally we got the move on eBay. Even though there were a lot of requests coming left and right, I decided to ignore them for a while to be able to get to a milestone with eBay. Otherwise it never gets done. It is such a complicated system and I have to spend about a day every time to remember the basics of eBay and what I did last.
I used to see people buying eBay books - trying to make it big on eBay. I guess it is possible. Actually the previous owner of our house used to make a living like that. The reason we know this is because when we came to see the house, it was full of ... err, stuff. The garage and a room in the house was dedicated to eBay. I used to think to myself: "what is so complicated about it? just trying to sell something online." Boy, was I wrong!
Lesson learned: if there are a lot of books on a subject, if there is a site that claims to be the university of that subject, well, it probably is a complicated subject. Do not underestimate it.
Looking from the software angle, I can understand what they tried to build. However, I think they failed miserably. eBay continuously makes surveys about customer satisfaction - buyer or seller. It looks like these surveys are telling them to focus on stuff like: clear refund, shipping, payment policies, more specifics about the item condition, etc. What is probably not captured is the complexity of it. I read a lot of material on eBay and I did not see a nice introduction to eBay for car dealers.
There are three concepts that make posting on eBay so complicated: sites, specifics and listing styles. eBay has many sites but let me make it clear: for American car dealers, there is only one site that matters: eBay Motors. To make things complicated, the listings on eBay Motors may be listed on other websites as well depending on the listing type - read on.
Item specifics is a general concept that I understand is necessary for a site like eBay. For car dealers (or vehicle dealers) a car or a vehicle is an Item in eBay terminology. The specs of that vehicle (like horse power, engine size, color, VIN, etc.) are the Item specifics. There are different categories to post different items and for vehicles, pretty much each make-model-trim has a category. In order to post in these categories, you need to enter certain specifics like VIN, condition, etc. Now this does not sound too complicated but if you look at the software model built for it you would understand what I mean. Very esoteric language.
Finally, there is the listing type. This is the part that most books on eBay spend pages explaining. For car dealers there are two types of listings: local or national. Local listings are classified postings - fixed price or best offer. National listings are mostly in auction style and have a whole set of complicated rules for managing the auctions. As I understand it, you should try to sell your vehicles in local markets first and if you can't sell it for a long time, use national auctions to get rid of the vehicle with a decent price.
Read more on Carsinia dealer software for eBay Motors.
I used to see people buying eBay books - trying to make it big on eBay. I guess it is possible. Actually the previous owner of our house used to make a living like that. The reason we know this is because when we came to see the house, it was full of ... err, stuff. The garage and a room in the house was dedicated to eBay. I used to think to myself: "what is so complicated about it? just trying to sell something online." Boy, was I wrong!
Lesson learned: if there are a lot of books on a subject, if there is a site that claims to be the university of that subject, well, it probably is a complicated subject. Do not underestimate it.
Looking from the software angle, I can understand what they tried to build. However, I think they failed miserably. eBay continuously makes surveys about customer satisfaction - buyer or seller. It looks like these surveys are telling them to focus on stuff like: clear refund, shipping, payment policies, more specifics about the item condition, etc. What is probably not captured is the complexity of it. I read a lot of material on eBay and I did not see a nice introduction to eBay for car dealers.
There are three concepts that make posting on eBay so complicated: sites, specifics and listing styles. eBay has many sites but let me make it clear: for American car dealers, there is only one site that matters: eBay Motors. To make things complicated, the listings on eBay Motors may be listed on other websites as well depending on the listing type - read on.
Item specifics is a general concept that I understand is necessary for a site like eBay. For car dealers (or vehicle dealers) a car or a vehicle is an Item in eBay terminology. The specs of that vehicle (like horse power, engine size, color, VIN, etc.) are the Item specifics. There are different categories to post different items and for vehicles, pretty much each make-model-trim has a category. In order to post in these categories, you need to enter certain specifics like VIN, condition, etc. Now this does not sound too complicated but if you look at the software model built for it you would understand what I mean. Very esoteric language.
Finally, there is the listing type. This is the part that most books on eBay spend pages explaining. For car dealers there are two types of listings: local or national. Local listings are classified postings - fixed price or best offer. National listings are mostly in auction style and have a whole set of complicated rules for managing the auctions. As I understand it, you should try to sell your vehicles in local markets first and if you can't sell it for a long time, use national auctions to get rid of the vehicle with a decent price.
Read more on Carsinia dealer software for eBay Motors.
Sunday, January 2, 2011
Form Wizard and New Website
It has been extremely busy in the past few months but it looks like we are catching up. During the holidays I finished the form wizard (which is a huge accomplishment by itself - this will enable us to design NCR forms - see this video for details), added or updated a lot of pages in carsinia website, I added 4 new videos on Youtube and finished our new website: dealer-software.net. We are hoping that these are going to increase our rankings as we have been slipping. I added a lot of release notes as to what we have been doing in the last quarter: http://carsinia.com/releases.html It is pretty impressive. I also did a few requests for our partner EZ Dealer Finance. We are really expecting a boost in sales in January. Stay tuned.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Dealer Software for Credit Applications
This was supposed to be an easy blog since it is pretty informal and I did not plan to care for SEO. I still cannot find the time to post. The amount of time I have is ridiculous. I knew that starting a company would be hard but it is much harder than I thought. If I were a server, my load would be 60 (the average number of tasks waiting to be done at any given second).
Well, the good news is that there is progress. We are chugging along. We are going to be doing our first hire for sale/support position and we are pretty excited about it. I just did the release for our marketing partner that added some info to their system. Not only it is a system that I was not familiar with but also it is in ASP.NET - a language that limits my programming abilities significantly. Sure, it is possible to do anything that I normally do with PHP but it is just so difficult - ASP.NET designers have this idea of how programming should be done and they try to put you in that frame.
The original authors of the system obeyed their directives, so I followed the suit. But probably there will be many changes later on. I am hoping that I can get that system in a better shape someday. Our integration will bring a powerful combination: dealers submitting credit apps to lenders at the same time. This may not sound like a big deal for million dollar franchised dealers out there but for independent used car dealerships, it is a huge deal. That's the number one question you would see on cardealerforums.com - how do I get financing for my customers?
Not only we will be making this possible, but also they will be getting participation profits. Participation is also known as reserves. They are a very attractive part of dealer profits. A few DMS companies (reyrey, ADP, finance express, dealer track, route1, etc) already do this but there is no complete solution for small dealers. We will be providing that. So, that's what I'm going to be working on next (along with generic credit application form and CUDL Auto smart inventory distribution - so many things to do, so little time).
Carsinia dealer software
Well, the good news is that there is progress. We are chugging along. We are going to be doing our first hire for sale/support position and we are pretty excited about it. I just did the release for our marketing partner that added some info to their system. Not only it is a system that I was not familiar with but also it is in ASP.NET - a language that limits my programming abilities significantly. Sure, it is possible to do anything that I normally do with PHP but it is just so difficult - ASP.NET designers have this idea of how programming should be done and they try to put you in that frame.
The original authors of the system obeyed their directives, so I followed the suit. But probably there will be many changes later on. I am hoping that I can get that system in a better shape someday. Our integration will bring a powerful combination: dealers submitting credit apps to lenders at the same time. This may not sound like a big deal for million dollar franchised dealers out there but for independent used car dealerships, it is a huge deal. That's the number one question you would see on cardealerforums.com - how do I get financing for my customers?
Not only we will be making this possible, but also they will be getting participation profits. Participation is also known as reserves. They are a very attractive part of dealer profits. A few DMS companies (reyrey, ADP, finance express, dealer track, route1, etc) already do this but there is no complete solution for small dealers. We will be providing that. So, that's what I'm going to be working on next (along with generic credit application form and CUDL Auto smart inventory distribution - so many things to do, so little time).
Carsinia dealer software
Friday, November 12, 2010
Agile dealer software development
Things take a lot longer in reality compared to what's in my mind. We have this beautiful plan laid out. It is just not working out fast enough. It is taking longer and longer. So, I decided to put together some conservative estimates and at some point I stopped because it was just getting unrealistic.
I try to use agile software development methods even though I am pretty much the only one developing. One of the principles of agile is that we don't plan too far ahead. There is a good reason for that. Priorities change all the time. Even if right now we could say these tasks are our "immediate" list, something may come along and trump that list. So, it's best to not even waste time to try to plan too far ahead when we know that it is probably not realistic.
In our case, this is probably a little extreme. My total tasks I have is 2,322 lines right now. About 190 of them are "urgent". So, I just prioritized what I think I can get done until this Sunday - which is probably going to take longer than I hope as well. That's about 90 lines. The rest of the 100 lines are in this semi-prioritized pile waiting to be pulled next week.
Life is not fair and certainly not very forgiving. I think success lies at a combination of luck and hard work. Can't remember who said it but I love this quote: "The harder I work, the luckier I get". So, we keep on trying as much as we can. We'll see what happens.
Now, I am admittedly a little pessimistic. There is actually good progress. We released the deal wizard and quick quote calculator and our new version is a big mile stone - so it's called Carsinia v2.0. We are also hiring a sales/support person - hopefully this will speed things up a bit as well. The feedback so far is pretty good. However, CredCo integration, EZ dealer finance credit application integration and a lot of critical forms are conspicuously missing. Not to mention some forms clients are waiting for, participation profit reports, lead life cycle management, vehicle type, rebate, fees, eBay, websites, Autocheck, etc. So much to do, so little time.
The highest priorities are CredCo and EZ integration. CredCo security scan revealed some issues with XSS (cross site scripting). I really do not think they are security issues. And what's worse, fixing those issues will potentially cause a lot of problems. I'm hoping that I will not be breaking anything while "fixing" their security leaks. EZ Integration is a pretty big project as well. I allocated one day for it - I hope that it's enough.
Carsinia dealer software
I try to use agile software development methods even though I am pretty much the only one developing. One of the principles of agile is that we don't plan too far ahead. There is a good reason for that. Priorities change all the time. Even if right now we could say these tasks are our "immediate" list, something may come along and trump that list. So, it's best to not even waste time to try to plan too far ahead when we know that it is probably not realistic.
In our case, this is probably a little extreme. My total tasks I have is 2,322 lines right now. About 190 of them are "urgent". So, I just prioritized what I think I can get done until this Sunday - which is probably going to take longer than I hope as well. That's about 90 lines. The rest of the 100 lines are in this semi-prioritized pile waiting to be pulled next week.
Life is not fair and certainly not very forgiving. I think success lies at a combination of luck and hard work. Can't remember who said it but I love this quote: "The harder I work, the luckier I get". So, we keep on trying as much as we can. We'll see what happens.
Now, I am admittedly a little pessimistic. There is actually good progress. We released the deal wizard and quick quote calculator and our new version is a big mile stone - so it's called Carsinia v2.0. We are also hiring a sales/support person - hopefully this will speed things up a bit as well. The feedback so far is pretty good. However, CredCo integration, EZ dealer finance credit application integration and a lot of critical forms are conspicuously missing. Not to mention some forms clients are waiting for, participation profit reports, lead life cycle management, vehicle type, rebate, fees, eBay, websites, Autocheck, etc. So much to do, so little time.
The highest priorities are CredCo and EZ integration. CredCo security scan revealed some issues with XSS (cross site scripting). I really do not think they are security issues. And what's worse, fixing those issues will potentially cause a lot of problems. I'm hoping that I will not be breaking anything while "fixing" their security leaks. EZ Integration is a pretty big project as well. I allocated one day for it - I hope that it's enough.
Carsinia dealer software
Monday, November 8, 2010
Dealer Software Vision
Dealer Software Vision
Conventional wisdom says do one thing only and do it perfect. I don't think that is correct. If it were, MP3 players would not be falling out of market, digital camera and camcorder sales would not be declining and we would not be going to Walmart to get electronics. But we do. It's just convenient. If you look at the dealer software market at this point, some companies embrace this philosophy. Some of them do only inventory distribution, some do only websites and some focus exclusively on finance. The big players do seem to have a solution for everything but if somebody understands their product offerings, please enlighten me as well. It seems so disconnected - no matter what they say.Our goal is to be like Walmart. We don't want to do only one thing. We want to be the only software that a dealer would need. We do not aim to do everything perfect - we just want to be good enough. We do not want our customers to be struggling to make 2-3 different vendors work together.
This is our dealer software vision. Unfortunately this means a lot of hard work. In this competitive environment, it is hard to be good enough in all arenas. Few of our competitors actually do embrace the same vision. And we hate them - with all due respect.
We'll see what happens in the long run. Let the best company win.
Carsinia Dealer Software
Sunday, November 7, 2010
New Blog
New Blog
Yes, I decided to setup a new blog in blogger.com. Carsinia actually has another blog at our main Carsinia dealer software website. I mostly write them myself. So, why a personal blog? There are three main reasons for setting up a new blog at blogger.com:- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Blogger.com is one of the biggest site on the net. Having even one link helps with our SEO.
- Features: Our main blog is kinda lacking some features. Among all the things that we need to do, we just cannot find the time to implement features for our blog. Some key ones are categories, searching blogs and most importantly having a better navigation structure. We have about 10 posts in our blog and all of them are under one menu. We are kinda running out of space there.
- Frequency: Blog means binary log - which is supposed to be like a diary. Well, with so much emphasis on SEO, we really cannot put a lot of logs out there. We proof read it, check readability, find possible keywords, optimize for them, find an image, etc. At best, it's about once a month. This blog is going to be more informal and informational. Not so much emphasis on SEO. And needless to say, it's a personal blog. So, it's not always about Carsinia (although it takes a big part in our personal lives).
So, this being said, what's new? Well, I am diligently working on the new finance functionality. Quick quote functionality is pretty much complete. I am working on a "deal wizard" feature where it's going to be possible to structure a deal. This is the "desking" functionality. The customer comes and wants to get a loan. It's all about that. It is actually possible to do that with the existing system as well but you would have to go back and forth a lot of screens and undo a lot of things if the deal does not fall through. Not very aesthetic.
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