Web Site Review: Exchange & Mart

URL: exchangeandmart.co.uk

Exchange and Mart sell a lot of other stuff besides cars, but they have a fairly substantial number (~90,000) of used cars for sale. 39 Peugeot 406 Coupés were listed.

The basic search facility for the page allows you to do a free-text search, which is useful as it allows you to add only those terms which are important, i.e. "Peugeot 406 coupe 2.0 blue leather". You can also narrow searches by clicking on the various options for manufacturer and model, and to further filter the results according to price or location.

The advanced search is more powerful, allowing you specify a range of options including the price, the age of adverts, fuel type and transmission. Unusually, more than one combination of model and manufacturer can be included in a single search, and min/max mileages and prices can be entered as free text rather than selected from a pre-set list.

Two cars caught my eye, both 2.0 SE's from 2000. One in silver, for sale privately, 80,000 miles for £3,500; the other red with 73,000 for £3899. Both come at the top of the ranking system I've created to help me make a decision - more of this anon.

Overall, the Exchange & Mart site is pretty good, but it is let down slightly by the number of vehicles available. For more common cars, they've probably got enough [A search for a Ford Focus within 20 miles of my home found 72 cars] but for a rarer beast like the 406 Coupé a larger supplier base is required. For comparison, Autotrader claims 365,000 cars on-line, of which 188 are 406 Coupés.

Web Site Review: Trovit Cars

No real news to report, other than that I did manage to meet potential future boss #1. It turns out he was waiting for me to get back to him, so I've confirmed that I'm interested in the job we discussed. Hopefully things will move on more quickly from here.

I thought that I would post a few thoughts on some of the websites that I've been perusing over the last few weeks.

URL: cars.trovit.co.uk

A site index rather than a site as such, which I normally find very irritating. Trovit have one useful feature though - they group the cars by various categories and allow you to restrict the search by clicking on the appropriate options. They also show how many cars are in each category (price, fuel, no of doors, mileage, fuel & transmission), which I found very useful. The data collection engine seems a bit flakey, though, as it hadn't captured the mileage or transmission of any of the 406 coupés that it found.

Most of the cars found were actually listed on 'preloved', 'gumtree' or on Ebay. The one car that caught my eye, a 2001 2.0 SE at £3980, was actually advertised on Preloved, but I also found it on Autotrader when I looked more closely.

I think the site might be a UK implementation of an American site, as it had mileages in km (the Yanks seem to think that everyone in Europe uses kilometres), but sorted fuel types into 'diesel' and 'gasoline'. Strange.