The latest twist in the auto business in Rangoon is online used car buying and selling websites, which dealers say has threatened the tradition way of doing business.
The government has allowed a steady steam of newer models into the country in a program to replace older models, but a result is that many buyers were not satisfied with the traditional broker-dealer method.
“Before I discovered some car trading websites, I had to rely on brokers and had to regularly telephone them to make single appointments to look at cars with buyers or sellers and then negotiate prices,” Aung Min Moe, a 34-year-old car broker in Rangoon told The Myanmar Times in an article published on Monday.
Now Internet users are discovering what’s been known in the West for decades – shopping is quicker and more efficient online.
Buyers and seller can now give a quick look at the model they’re interested in, and get a rundown on its features and price, all in minutes: no more using the often shaky telephone service and driving across town only to find that the salesperson over-hyped their cars.
And of course, with a straight buyer-seller relationship, the middleman and his fee, is cut out.
Now, of course, even the brokers are learning that two can play the game, and they’re putting their cars on a website to generate more business. Everyone is winning: in the West, it’s called productivity.
One of the bastions of car dealing in Rangoon, the Hantharwaddy car zone, was often a frustrating place for buyers, said the newspaper.
“If you wanted to buy a car and went to somewhere like Hantharwaddy you couldn’t just go up and ask the prices of the cars, even if they were right there. Instead, you had to approach brokers and ask them, which could take a long time,” Khin Win was quoted as saying.
You can also thank the government for this new twist. The newspaper said that the car import substitution program gave many car buyers their first taste of online buying because they had to go the online car auction sites to find what they wanted.
A spokesperson for the new myanmarcarsdb website said it had received more than 10,000 unique visitors since it was launched on January 4, with more than 328,000 views. By the second week of February, the site had 420 registered users and 180 advertisements.
