FREE advertising for the PUBLIC

[Drew]

After being forced to settle for a less then par website we were able to raise what we needed to do what we actually wanted. We are very close to finishing the development on our new site. It is going to serve the purpose of allowing the public of Calgary a means to advertise their vehicles for free. This new system is crazy, users will have the ability to do quite a few things while managing there own ads. I won't tell you guys all the features but we are working soooooo hard to try and make this work. Our efforts are focused on directing traffic to your vehicle for free. I personally am sick of paying a non disclosed TRADER of vehicles insane amounts of money for providing a service in a monopolized industry.... Please help us help you by showing support. Any comments, suggestions or questions are not only welcome, they are greatly encouraged.

Drew Henson
Public Automotives

[afrotl]

will businesses also get to advertise on this site?

[69cougar]

Yippee :clap: :clap:

[Drew]

Yes, business's are more then welcome to post on the site. Non-sponsors will be allowed 5 posts maximum at a time, sponsors will have unlimited posting.

69cougar, in regards to another vehicle being sold on this site you posted:

"just checked it out and it is the real deal,"

all vehicles being sold anywhere are subject to not being legal or part of a scam. You knew this infinity was not part of a scam only upon visiting it. Our site has a feature where every car carries certain reviews and rates on it from customers who have actually been to visit the car. From these you can get a better feeling then anywhere else about what cars are legit and which ones not. ANY CAR found to be
questionable in any mannor will be removed and the proper authorities notified and ANY USER found conducting questionable business will also be turned over.

Public Automotives is fully licensed and one of those licenses is from the Alberta Motor Vehicle Industry Council. We follow their code of ethics to the strictest degree.

Our status and the code of conduct in Alberta may be found here if anyone would like to verify us at any time.

http://www.amvic.org/

[69cougar]

What the hell are you talking about??

[Drew]

Originally posted by 69cougar
bump for a sweet ride!!

just checked it out and it is the real deal,

Any chance of parting out the "howling Wolf" plate??

:bigpimp:

this can be found here:
http://forums.beyond.ca/showthread.php?s=&threadid=84148&highlight=69cougar

69cougar, I am in no way trying to offend you and I apologize if I did that with my quoting you. I just felt it was an appropriate way to respond to your concern. Furthermore thank you for your concerns and feel free to fire them off as other people most likely have the same concerns.

[69cougar]

Originally posted by Drew


this can be found here:
http://forums.beyond.ca/showthread.php?s=&threadid=84148&highlight=69cougar

69cougar, I am in no way trying to offend you and I apologize if I did that with my quoting you. I just felt it was an appropriate way to respond to your concern. Furthermore thank you for your concerns and feel free to fire them off as other people most likely have the same concerns.

I thought this was what you were referring to as it is the only car I have ever done any homework on. I am confused as I thought it was advertised on beyond not on the site that you posted the thread on. That being said I was bumping the seller not your publication.

Like I said when you start adverting for free you seem to end up with a Bargain Finder style publication which is usually full of junk.

Interesting Idea, I see that you are charging $60 if a sale takes place. How do ypu plan on collecting?? Honour system??

[Drew]

It was advertised on beyond. Anytime, anywhere, anyone can be pulling a scam. This is life, the only way to know for sure is to go and visit that vehicle and do the research.

My point was that you reviewed a car you had visited for the rest of the world to know the results positive or negative. Had the car you visited had anything wrong with it i'm sure you would of flammed the owner and rightfully so. We offer the chance to do this on a site completely geared to selling vehicles. I love beyond, and obviously so do you. But its main feature is not selling vehicles, and in that industry bargain finder and trader are only paid ad spots, we want to create a community where it matters if you get poor reviews or positive reviews much like on beyond. To get more traffic to you vehicles from the specific target market of Calgary we have many marketing plans lined up in which we will help get traffic to your car.

The $60 in which you are referring to was on the old website. Anything on that website is now being replaced. We had to charge that when we first came out because we needed to raise funds to code and build this new webapplication. And it was not on the honor system there was written authorization from anyone who posted legally binding them to pay that fee. I would like to make this clear, there is NO fee for a Public user to post on our site.

No vehicle will be posted on the website without validation from an administrator and every ad will come with an expiry date and option to renew by email at that time. What you call junk is perhaps the 500$ shell that someone really is looking for to build their dream car. Also there is a limit on how many posts a user can have at a time. This plus valid email addresses and other undisclosed strategies are our tactics to keep any "curber of junk" to a minimum.

[Drew]

69cougar

I will be unable to reply so quickly to your posts (but I will reply by the end of the day), but I encourage you to keep questionning us until you are satisfied that you would like to post on and use PublicAutomotives.com

Drew Henson
Public Automotives

[Drew]

Did you (or anyone for that matter) have any other concerns or questions? We really try to listen to what people have to say because the people are the public and thats who we are doing this for. So I'd like to thank you for your time in posting concerns. I would really like to have you and all other beyond members use our site because they believe in it. If you still have any concerns please let us know as it will be greatly beneficial to making this work at a standard that real people such as yourself deem useful.

[Drew]

Well the new site is up as of yesterday, you guys should check it out and let me know what you think.

http://www.publicautomotives.com

[Celica TVS3]

I like the idea. Infact I'll post my car on there and see if I get any interest. I have a couple of questions for you though.

How do you plan on paying the bills if you're not charging anything for listings? Are you working out ad deals? Will you be selling user information?

How are you going to promote the site? It's a great idea if you can drive enough people to it.

[ninjak84]

Hey Drew
You need to fix the options bar at the bottom of each ad.
As it is, anyone can move or delete whatever ad they want to right now.

[AllGoNoShow]

Your based in Calgary
Your main Target area is Calgary
Calgary is in Canada

yet the currency is US, pounds, euros, and we have the option of zip not postal.

[Drew]

CelicaTVS3,

Under NO circumstances will I EVER sell user information. The site is going to be free to dealerships for the time being but they will be capped as far as how much inventory/$$ they can put on at a later date. In the future users can opt to pay for special listings such as highlighting and featured ads, but for now I'd just like to help people sell there car without paying you know who hundreds of dollars. The site has advertisements coming out in the new EGO Calgary magazine as well as other niches such as beyond.


ninjak84

Hey Al, I had you listed as a moderator, so you should be able to see that option, but other people should not, so if anyone else can please let me know

AllGoNoShow

I KNEW someone was gonna raise hell about this, VERY good point, I am waiting for a reply on the location of that text in the files from techsupport because I was unable to locate it prior to yesterday. I opened the site regardless because I need this time to fix bugs like that before the magazine ads go out.

[AllGoNoShow]

Last time I checked I couldn't see the edit delete thing ninjak is talking about. When you fix the US parts I will look it over again and post and play around.

[ninjak84]

Originally posted by AllGoNoShow
Last time I checked I couldn't see the edit delete thing ninjak is talking about.

My mistake, I just didn't know I was a moderator, that's all :)

The site looks great, and the few cars that are on there are already getting lots of views. Time to put my money where my mouth is, and list my car for sale :D

[Drew]

Ha, status and you just don't know it, I was about to tell you...haha

[benm]

Originally posted by 69cougar
Yippee :clap: :clap:


Another place for curbers to run their scams from

That's the problem with freebie sites. How much is too much to pay to sell your car? Obviously, some (one? haha) of the sites out there is WAY overcharging. But what about www.carpages.ca (my own site) or something similiar that charges a nominal one-time fee until the car sells?

[arian_ma]

Do you think you will have a search feature sort of like the autotrader's where people can cap the price of the cars they are looking for or the KM's etc.?
Looks like your site is going to pick up very very quickly and if it does I know there is going to be a lot of acuras and hondas under those headings and it will take a lot of time to look for what you want.
Site is looking very good though.

[Drew]

Originally posted by benm


That's the problem with freebie sites. How much is too much to pay to sell your car?

As far as I am concerned any $$ is too much to sell your car through an internet ad site. Are you seriously trying to tell me that people who are trying to sell scammed cars do not post them in the paper or trader? It is well known that scams happen everywhere, most likely on your site as well(which is nice by the way).

The only real problem with "freebie" sites is that paid sites hate to see them. Of course you hate them, why would a customer pay you if they don't have to? The problem with charging a one time fee until the cars sells is this:

Suppose you don't sell the car, say it sells somewhere else or just doesn't sell. Then you just charged someone for a service you did not provide. After getting sick of paying for absolutly nothing several times myself, I made PublicAutomotives.com

[Drew]

Originally posted by arian_ma
Do you think you will have a search feature sort of like the autotrader's where people can cap the price of the cars they are looking for or the KM's etc.?


This is a very good suggestion. Piece by piece I plan on changing the website based on suggestions such as yours to provide something that people actually want to use. So to answer your question, yes but I just don't know when.

For now, each category has the ability to be subdivided again. If there is a large demand for honda's and acura's then I will most likely first seperate each make into a subdvision of models for better user functionability.

[viffer]

Is the site down? I'm getting a Page cannot be Found error.

I posted an ad yesterday, I really like the ad creation system. Uploading photos is simple as well.

Nice work on the site. :thumbsup:

[/////AMG]

not working for me either

[Lexxan]

lol yeah you do this.. then you get a customer base and start charging.. pretty smart :)

[Drew]

Right now the site is down. A critical security update needs to be installed. Last night I caught an unauthorized user attempting to do some serious damage and pulled the plug on the site. Fortunately I was able to stop him prior to core file deletions, and had backed up the files he was screwing with. I think i was working on the site from a public computer that cached my admin access, and someone who actually wanted to do malicious things happened to stop by. I was logged on and looking at another admin logged on, then little things started to go wrong...


I am very sorry and to be honest a little embarresed about this, services will resume as soon as I make sure this never happens again.

[Drew]

And with no more caching of the admin settings, we are back online....

[ninjak84]

Sweet!
That was a bit of a scare.... Shouldn't happen again :thumbsup:


Originally posted by viffer
I posted an ad yesterday, I really like the ad creation system. Uploading photos is simple as well.

Nice work on the site. :thumbsup:

Thanks for the comments, your ad was posted as soon as the problem was fixed. Hope you sell the car :)

[Drew]

Originally posted by AllGoNoShow
When you fix the US parts I will look it over again and post and play around.

Done and done...

[AllGoNoShow]

k I'll play later.


raz stop fucking with the website, I put $5 it was u ;)

[Drew]

Any other suggestions that anyone would like to see a website like this one have?