DrivenByYou.com represents a new approach to buying cars online. Traditional online car buying guides users to shop for automobiles by selecting a make, model or year as the first step of the buying process. Autotrader.com decided to take lessons learned from shoppers at brick-and-mortar auto dealerships and apply them to an online car buying experience. Realizing that most brick-and-mortar car buyers seek out local dealership offers and specials prior to selecting a make and model, Autotrader.com sought to make online car shopping easier and more intuitive. By applying the same "first step" that car shoppers normally take when shopping local dealerships in person, DrivenByYou.com facilitates a quicker method for buyers to drill down to a vehicle that's within their purchasing budget.
To create this new type of car shopping experience, Autotrader.com partnered with Mediacurrent to build a unique Drupal solution. Drupal was a natural fit for the project because of its highly flexible framework and the project's compressed timeline for site launch. Drivenbyyou.com employs an array of standard Drupal core and contrib modules that allow it to ingest a nightly vehicle inventory feed with over 12,000 records, download thousands of vehicle photo files, and associate promotions with hundreds of vehicles across 40 auto dealerships with a few mouse clicks. Drupal's theming flexible theming layer gave Mediacurrent the ability to integrate a customized clean, modern user interface design with an emphasis on simplicity.
Overall, Drupal was the linchpin in the timely launch of DrivenByYou.com. Its vast number of available modules allowed Mediacurrent to build an extremely complex and feature-rich site quickly. Read the case study to learn how the Mediacurrent team built DrivenByYou.com and let us know what you think!