YC-backed new car-buying service CarWoo is partnering up with car comparison site FindTheBest, which operates something like a Kayak.com for hundreds of products and services from smartphones to snow blowers. The partnership means FindTheBest’s Car Comparison tool will now point users over to CarWoo’s service when shoppers are ready to look for a local dealer.
For those unfamiliar with CarWoo, the company operates in the same space as TrueCar, allowing car buyers to specify the make, model, style and color of the car they’re interested in, then receive offers from nearby dealers. Shoppers can also negotiate with those dealers anonymously via phone, email or from the site itself as a part of the service being offered.
Explains CarWoo CEO Tommy McClung, part of his company’s strategy has been to provide online publishers a better car buying experience for their users, and the new FindTheBest partnership is one example of that.
“Today if you head to most automotive websites… pick one, you’ll find forms asking you to fill in your contact information to receive a ‘free price quote’ from a dealer. A consumer thinks they are going to get real quotes form dealers, instead their personal contact information is sold into an ecosystem worth billions of dollars and the consumer is inundated with spam, automated emails from dealers (without price quotes), unwanted phone calls and even spam from affiliated industries (insurance, finance, etc.),” McClung says. “This is the industry we are disrupting.”
He adds that FindTheBest could have partnered with any automotive lead buyers, like Autobytel, Dealix, or AutoUSA, and then easily have made quick bucks by selling shoppers’ information. But the site chose CarWoo instead, because the alternative would have led to a bad experience for their users.
Kleiner Perkins-backed FindTheBest was founded in 2009 by DoubleClick founder and CEO Kevin O’Connor and CeBotics CEO Scott Leonard. Today, its engine allows for comparisons across over 800 different categories. The company is now seeing 7.5 million visits per month, and is still growing.
The CarWoo integration is live on the FindTheBest car comparison site here – just look for the big blue buttons reading “FindTheBest Dealer.”