Classic Car Parts Marketing

This morning, my son put me onto a website he found that lets you choose a car model and it returns current offerings on eBaymotors and classifieds (mostly Craigslist) from across the US. I’ve generally found that Craigslist.com is a great place to look for cars, but — until now — you had to search city by city.

In this site, results come back in an easy-to-use list format, complete with a thumbnail photo, the vehicle’s location, description, price (or current bid, for auctions), and a hotlink to the actual ad.

I can’t tell how serious the designer is about maintaining and developing this tool, but for now it’s handy and fun if you’re interested in one of the 30 or so types of car listed. For example, I found 326 models of Alfa Romeo. You can filter your results; typing “84″ in the search box netted me thirteen 1984 Alfa Romeos. At times, you’ll find cars double-listed because the seller has them in more than one Craigslist city.

Check it out foryourself at http://www.jaxed.com/cgi-bin/ms.cgi?.

Poking around the rest of jaxed.com, I found:

1. The fellow is into Corvairs, so he may be weird but can’t be all bad ;-)
2. He’s also developed a free tool that lets you search Craigslist and eBay listings for misspelled items, on the theory that they’re less likely to be found and may sell at bargain prices. It uses a variety of techniques to arrive at misspellings. Try it here.

By the way, should you decide to bid on a car you find through either of these sites, it would be wise — just on general principle – to make sure you’re on the real eBaymotors by typing in the url directly.

Technorati Tags: craigslist, classified ads, ebay, cars, jaxed.com

Decoding a pre-1981 vehicle identification number used to require some digging. I’ve just learned that the folks over at DecodeThis have been building a cool ”universal” VIN decoder. It’s not quite universal yet; at this writing, their program covers most domestic cars from 1960-1973 (especially musclecars). They’re continually adding new “patterns,” and they asked me to check back in a few months if my car wasn’t there. Try it out for yourself:

If you’re squeamish about entering the “serial number” portion, you can substitute Xs.

Of course, there are websites that specialize in VIN identification for a given range of car…here’s a sampling: Camaro, Corvair, Corvette, Firebird, Mustang, Triumph Spitfire, and Volkswagen. And there are a couple more classic VIN sites that are somewhat general in nature, here and here. (Note: if you’ve reached this permalink from sometime in the future, some of the links may be obsolete.)

Technorati Tags: vehicle identification number, vin decoder, classic car

Competition continues to heat up in the automotive parts and accessories business.

Our friends at Direct Newsline just reported this astonishing tidbit: the automotive products category was the fastest-growing in the entire catalog industry, based on the number of listings in the National Directory of Catalogs published by Oxbridge Communications. During the last 5 years, the number of automotive titles rose from 261 to 553 (an increase of 112%).

I would add that this increase is not necessarily a statistically “hard” number, since listing in the Oxbridge book is voluntary and the percentage of catalogers availing themselves of it may have changed. But still…

technorati tags: automotive catalogs, car parts, catalog marketing

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