How Online Car-Selling Platforms Are Changing Used Car Sales

Selling a used car on your own is a lot of work. You clean it, gather records, guess at a price, take photos, meet strangers, and handle all the paperwork. The Globe and Mail looked at how online car-selling platforms are removing that burden, and CarDoor was featured as one of the companies leading the change. 

Here is a short summary, with a link to the full article at the end. 

Selling a car on your own is harder than it looks, and can come with real safety concerns

The work is only part of it. The bigger issue is the potential danger that can come with it. Selling privately means inviting people you do not know to your home, sharing your phone number and address, and handing over your keys for a test drive. For a lot of sellers, that makes personal safety a real concern.

Then there is the value aspect. You have to figure out what your car is actually worth, field offers, and hope the person across from you is dealing in good faith. A CarDoor survey referenced in the piece found that 56%  of Canadians had a negative experience selling a car, with lowball offers and safety concerns being two of the top reasons.

One seller's experience using CarDoor

The article followed Tina Sheaves, a busy operations executive who decided to sell her 2020 Chevrolet Corvette. She did not want people coming to her home or taking her sports car out for a test drive, and she was concerned about getting paid safely. So she did some research on the best way to sell it and came upon CarDoor. She listed the car, an offer came in within hours, and after a little back and forth she got the price she was after. She never left her house, nor did she have to give out her address to dozens of strangers. 

What people actually want when they sell

Tina's story is not unusual. It points to what most sellers are really after: a fair price, a safe process, and zero hassle. People used to be comfortable with a long and time-consuming sales process. That is no longer the case. The appetite now is for a way to sell that is secure, simple, and quick, without giving up value to get there. 

A fast offer is not always a fair one

This is where the different models start to matter. Some services make selling easy by giving you an instant offer. That is convenient, but it comes with a catch. They buy low so they can resell at a higher profit, and that margin comes out of your price.

CarDoor takes a different path. It is not a retailer and does not buy your car to resell it. Instead, verified dealers across Ontario compete for your vehicle, the market decides what it is worth, and CarDoor handles the payment and all the paperwork for the seller.

That competition is also why high-end cars do well on CarDoor. The article noted the platform works especially well for supercar and luxury sellers, because the right buyer is out there, it just takes having access to a large pool of dealers to find them.

The bigger shift

Selling a car has moved from newspaper ads to online classifieds to platforms that take care of the hard parts for you, yet what sellers want has stayed the same: a secure and easy process and a fair offer. 

Read the full article on The Globe and Mail here.