Designing an empowering experience for CarEdge's referral funnel

Timeline

3 weeks

tools

Figma

role

Principal UX Designer

How might we make it easier for car-buyers to find the right car at the right price?

Introduction

CarEdge is an online platform where users can browse through car listings and purchase digital products and services that aids them during the entire car-buying process, being auto professional advocates for the users. Eventually as a company, we reached a stage where we needed to follow the model of referring users as leads to dealerships just as most our competitors were.

I was tasked to design an experience where users could inquire out-the-door pricing from dealerships to quickly compare prices to determine which is the right deal.

Problem

Buyers don't know what the right price for a car is even when provided with OTDs (out-the-doors). The car industry is competitive and sales people typically try to overcharge buyers as much as possible by including unnecessary add-ons and fees.

This makes buyers discouraged to contact dealers, keep hunting for better listings with a better price, and leading to decision paralysis, keeping them in the research phase longer than necessary.

Goals

Empower buyers to feel confident to choose the right car

Increase user signups

Create a high-conversion funnel that sells leads to dealers (industry standard is 19%)

Design Solution

By designing a new user flow and leveraging our proprietary market data, we sought to deliver an effortless experience that would let buyers unlock certain data in exchange for providing their contact information to dealers.

This new user flow consisted on the following:

  1. A redesigned vehicle detail page
    A new vehicle detail page that incentivizes buyers to provide their information to contact dealers and to unlock their buyer's guide by leading them into the referral funnel.
  2. A seamless referral funnel
    A sales funnel that let's users inquire OTDs from multiple dealers at the same time by recommending nearby dealerships with the same make & model.
  3. The CarEdge Buyer's guide
    Proprietary data, charts, and insights to learn what the right price is for a car and use that as leverage during the negotiation process.

Vehicle detail page (VDP)

We cleaned the clutter from the VDP and simplified it to get user to quickly review understand the details of the vehicle. This way we can accelerate their decision-making process and having a conclusion that either this is the right car or not.

Adding a simple form and incentivizing that they will unlock a buyer's guide for said make & model. This leads them to think that, unlike our competitors, we are still with them even after submitting their contact information.

REferral funnel

Allowing users to multi-send one inquiry to numerous dealers at once to shortcut repetitive rounds of submitting one by one.

Buyer's guide

Using the same data that dealerships use and our own algorithm to showcase valuable data points, ratings, a step-by-step car-buying checklist, and more.

Results

The launch of this new flow was an iterative process. Reviewing analytics, talking with users, and revising, this process made this product a success becoming the main source or income for the company.

Overall NPS increased from 70 to 80
Increased account creation by 18%
Generated annual recurring revenue by over $200K with a conversion rate of 23%