Auto Mobile Invest — car dealer with its own website
The additional costs are shown with the car.
01 — Context
For the same dealer. Every sale brings costs on top of the price: taxes the buyer has to pay himself, and they differ sharply from one car to the next.
02
The problem
The site showed the price of the car. What that car would cost on top of that, the buyer did not know, and the answer differs per vehicle and per situation. So he phoned. The salesperson looked it up, worked it out and gave a figure — again, for every single interested buyer. More frustrating still: visitors who did not phone assumed the worst case, or only discovered the cost late in the process. That is precisely the moment at which a sale falls apart.
03
Our approach
The calculation is not guesswork but legislation, and that makes this case different from how it looks. The amount depends on a set of characteristics of the car — fuel, emissions, power, Euro standard — and on where the buyer lives, because Belgium's regions calculate it differently.
A calculator that uses a single formula therefore simply gives a wrong number to some of its visitors. And a wrong number is worse than no number: it turns an aid into a problem. That is why the tool asks for the buyer's region first, and only then does the sum.
For the rest it uses what is already known about the car, so the visitor never has to enter anything the system knows perfectly well. The rates and formulas deliberately do not sit in the code but in a separate configuration: they are revised periodically, and such a revision ought to be a matter of minutes, not grounds for a new software release. That way the tool does not quietly go out of date.
The amount appears with the car, together with a note that it is an indication and what that indication is based on. The last part is not legal caution but trust: a visitor who can see how the figure comes about will believe it.
04
The result
The buyer knows what the car will really cost him before he gets in touch, and the salesperson no longer answers that question over and over again. The conversation now starts further along the process than it used to.
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