Do NOT use motors.co.uk to sell your car!

dustywarrior

This is a friendly warning to anyone who is looking to sell there car. You may have noticed the motors.co.uk adverts scattered around. Well I noticed their cheap £9.99 price and there offer to keep your car advertised until it says!

So I decided to put my car for sale on their site, I signed up paid my fee and starting putting the details in. I would like to point out there seller interface is pretty poor and once you upload the photos there is no conformation at all as to whether they uploaded or not or where they are!

When you edit your add you can't see your existing photos. It took me 3 days to finally get my ad online with all the photos working (at least I thought) since it takes them over a day to approve your ad every time you edit something.

This is bad enough but now I have two problems; the first is that 2 of my photos are being displayed on my ad (its just showing the url of the image instead) and the second is that my main photo is not displaying in the ad listings! This is quite a big thing since a lot of people skim through the listings and see the photos!

So, I decided to email their help address to explain the problem, I emailed them on Monday, and have had no reply whatsoever, I've emailed them four times since and had nothing back at all.

If you go on their 'Contact Us' page on the site you will see there is no phone number for contact sellers, on dealerships! I'm going to call them on Monday anyway but i'm sure they will tell me to just email their private sellers address.

So all in all I'm pretty annoyed and would advise everyone else to stay well away from them, there cheap for a reason; they have no support at all. The whole operation seems very novice to me and I wouldn't be suprised if the company is operating out of someones basement!

Strider590

Don't suppose you could change the title to motors(dot)co(dot)uk?

By putting that address on one of the UKs biggest forums, your actually only helping to increase their websites SEO and put them closer to the top of Google search results.

Kilty_2

Strider590 wrote: »

Don't suppose you could change the title to motors(dot)co(dot)uk?

By putting that address on one of the UKs biggest forums, your actually only helping to increase their websites SEO and put them closer to the top of Google search results.

Chances are this post will appear before their own site eventually- forums like this are ridiculously good as far as SEO goes. :rotfl:

bob_a_builder

but also increasing the chance of a possible customer finding the "bad press" too

Worked that way on the recent "neverpaintagain" thread in InMyHome section - the bad press on here showed up as 3rd or 4th entry in google, despite all the SEO spamming stuff the guy running it was/is doing

was going to link to it but seems its been taken down now ! - still some but not the big one !

but think you need a few more complaints than this to constitute bad press

dustywarrior

I'm actually an internet marketer and do a lot of SEO and I'm pretty sure the text motors.co.uk is not going to help their SEO efforts if it was a backlink then yes, but simply mentioning the site name in plain text is not going help them (if it did my job would be a WHOLE lot easier )

I'm going to ring their dealership number tomorow and keep ringing them until I get some kind of response to my problem. I will keep you all posted!

Nicola-Motors

Hi, I am really sorry to hear about the experience you have had when trying to place your private advert with motors.co.uk. We always try to ensure that our customers (dealerships and private sellers) recieve the best possible service at all times. If you would like to give me a call we would be happy to help you try and resolve your complaint - you can reach motors.co.uk customer services on 0845 265 6000 and then press 1, please ask for me directly and I will be happy to assit you. Once again I am sorry for any past poor service you feel you have receievd.
Nicola - Head of Customer Services

Nicola-Motors

Further to my last post, I was really disappointed to see poor comments about the level of customer service perceived to be on offer at motors.co.uk and as a result of the forum, I brought this up at our executive meeting yesterday. We have now decided to take down our private seller platform in order to make it much more user friendly and truly value for money. We will be re-launching the platform shortly and I would be interested to hear form anybody that would like to take part in some user testing for us?

Dustywarrior, I am still keen to help you sell your car, so please contact us, so we can assist you with the problems you have experienced.

dustywarrior

Hi Nicola,

Thanks very much for responding here, it's good to know that motors.co.uk does have some customer support after all!

You and some of your collegues were very helpful in sorting out my problem and fixing the photo. Unfortunately I think there are still some technical problems with it. It seems to work from some locations but not others (I have cleared my cache etc). I've tried from two different ISP's and 2 browsers but the photo isnt loading.

I have a server in America however which loads the photo no problem. Doing a DNS lookup on the domain name that hosts the photo (cdn.motors.co.uk) and this resolves to two different places when querying from here (My ISP's are o2 and orange) and querying over in America.

Looks to be some kind of issue with how the content is distributed but i've emailed this to your help address.

Thanks again.

Flyboy152

dustywarrior wrote: »

This is a friendly warning to anyone who is looking to sell there car. You may have noticed the motors.co.uk adverts scattered around. Well I noticed their cheap £9.99 price and there offer to keep your car advertised until it says!

So I decided to put my car for sale on their site, I signed up paid my fee and starting putting the details in. I would like to point out there seller interface is pretty poor and once you upload the photos there is no conformation at all as to whether they uploaded or not or where they are!

When you edit your add you can't see your existing photos. It took me 3 days to finally get my ad online with all the photos working (at least I thought) since it takes them over a day to approve your ad every time you edit something.

This is bad enough but now I have two problems; the first is that 2 of my photos are being displayed on my ad (its just showing the url of the image instead) and the second is that my main photo is not displaying in the ad listings! This is quite a big thing since a lot of people skim through the listings and see the photos!

So, I decided to email their help address to explain the problem, I emailed them on Monday, and have had no reply whatsoever, I've emailed them four times since and had nothing back at all.

If you go on their 'Contact Us' page on the site you will see there is no phone number for contact sellers, on dealerships! I'm going to call them on Monday anyway but i'm sure they will tell me to just email their private sellers address.

So all in all I'm pretty annoyed and would advise everyone else to stay well away from them, there cheap for a reason; they have no support at all. The whole operation seems very novice to me and I wouldn't be suprised if the company is operating out of someones basement!

Never deal with a business, where you cannot telephone them on a land line, or write to a real address.

Nicola-Motors

Thanks for your replies:
Dustywarrior – we are currently investigating the issues you have raised and these should be rectified shortly. In the meantime we have taken down our private seller platform so this doesn’t impact on any new sellers. I will keep you posted on developments. If you are interested in taking part in some of our user testing then please let me know?

Flyboy 152 – As you will see form my previous comments, we have now taken down our private seller platform until we can resolve some of the issues we are experiencing.
Our new platform will also offer telephone support, in the meantime if you would like to give me a call on 0845 265 6000 and ask for Nicola or write to us at 80F Corinthian Court, Milton Park, Oxfordshire OX14 4RY, I will be happy to assist you with your query and refund the £9.99 you have paid.
Again if you would like to take part in some user testing for our new platform then we would love to hear from you?

Flyboy152

Nicola-Motors wrote: »

Thanks for your replies:
Dustywarrior – we are currently investigating the issues you have raised and these should be rectified shortly. In the meantime we have taken down our private seller platform so this doesn’t impact on any new sellers. I will keep you posted on developments. If you are interested in taking part in some of our user testing then please let me know?

Flyboy 152 – As you will see form my previous comments, we have now taken down our private seller platform until we can resolve some of the issues we are experiencing.
Our new platform will also offer telephone support, in the meantime if you would like to give me a call on 0845 265 6000 and ask for Nicola or write to us at 80F Corinthian Court, Milton Park, Oxfordshire OX14 4RY, I will be happy to assist you with your query and refund the £9.99 you have paid.
Again if you would like to take part in some user testing for our new platform then we would love to hear from you?

Don't you think that it would have been better to have allowed your customers to be able to contact you in the first place, rather than wait until someone complains on an open consumer advice forum? What was the rationale behind preventing consumers from contacting you by telephone.

Nonetheless, if you would like to take the time to read the terms and conditions of this forum, you will see that you should have asked permission from the site administrators to post acting as a company representative.