EV-CPO.com CPO Consolidator support thread

[tornado7]

As I asked before, can people order/buy cars from other countries in Europe like they can in the states?

To be honest, I am not sure about this. Will check with the sales personel at my nearest store and keep you updated. Also not sure how to compare states within the same country (US) and actual multiple countries (e.g. buying a norwegian car as a swiss person).

Oh, and surely there's no need to hurry ;-)

 

[Cyclone]

To be honest, I am not sure about this. Will check with the sales personel at my nearest store and keep you updated. Also not sure how to compare states within the same country (US) and actual multiple countries (e.g. buying a norwegian car as a swiss person).

Oh, and surely there's no need to hurry ;-)

The difference is that on the U.S., you can only pick one US State at a time to get the listings, though you can buy from any state. With a dozen+ states, it's extremely annoying to get a list, look through them, pick another state, look through those, etc.

For the international sites, all cars within a county are on one page. So you do not have the nice tabular format of EV-CPO, but you can get to all listed cars easily. Now, if you can buy from other European countries, then you have the same problem as the US site in trying to see all the listings available to you.

 

[cab]

Well couldn't resist signing up any longer...just did the 3 month fully loaded Hank. Really appreciate all your work on this.

 

[HankLloydRight]

Well couldn't resist signing up any longer...just did the 3 month fully loaded Hank. Really appreciate all your work on this.

thanks!

 

[supersnoop]

I've been doing way to much research, and found some discrepancies between the way options are presented for the seats.

It appears that "Leather" and "Nappa" are the same thing.
And, it looks like "Leather and Alcantara" is the same as the "Performance" seats.

Is there any actually difference between these options? In some cases, I think they new codes for the same option.

 

[HankLloydRight]

I've been doing way to much research, and found some discrepancies between the way options are presented for the seats.

It appears that "Leather" and "Nappa" are the same thing.
And, it looks like "Leather and Alcantara" is the same as the "Performance" seats.

Is there any actually difference between these options? In some cases, I think they new codes for the same option.

I absolutely agree. But this is just the way that Tesla has encoded the options. Perhaps there were small production changes in the seats that warranted a different option code. Who knows? All I know is that the option codes come in, they have descriptions, and that's what is displayed. Unfortunately, I don't have any way to merge together the options that in reality are exactly the same.

 

[MorrisonHiker]

Thanks!

Yes, if you subscribe to the Premium option, smart air and UHF are sortable/filterable columns. Otherwise, you can put those specific option codes into the search box separated by spaces.

I might've missed it (long thread)...but did you change it so that the ability to search by option codes is now only available with a Premium subscription? I've tried searching by various option codes and it doesn't seem to work.

 

[HankLloydRight]

I might've missed it (long thread)...but did you change it so that the ability to search by option codes is now only available with a Premium subscription? I've tried searching by various option codes and it doesn't seem to work.

That's always been the case. Loading all the options for all cars listed takes a significant amount of bandwidth for each page load.

 

[MorrisonHiker]

That's always been the case. Loading all the options for all cars listed takes a significant amount of bandwidth for each page load.

Ah ok. I went by your use of "otherwise" and thought you meant you could search by options even without a subscription. Thanks.

 

[HankLloydRight]

Ah ok. I went by your use of "otherwise" and thought you meant you could search by options even without a subscription. Thanks.

Yeah, maybe poor grammar on my part in that post. Sorry.

 

[cab]

Hank,

Now that I've had a chance to use the subscription version, a couple of requests:

1. Alert Naming - When saving an Alert can you allow for a user-defined name to be applied to the alert like "Pearl White S85s with air suspension". This could be included in the body and header of the alert e-mail as well. Since there are few "Or" options with the searcehs it requires multiple searches be defined and this would help to weed through them. I find I relied on this a lot with my Autotrader alerts.

2. Alert Editing - If I'm not mistaken, alerts can't be edited and thus any changes require an alert be deleted and re-added. Editing would be nice. Let me know if I am mistaken on this!

3. Not Conditions - For the alerts it looks like "OR" conditions require separate alerts. If "ORs" are too difficult to implement, what about "Not" conditions? As an example, If I am interested only in 85kwh hr cars and above, there could be a '<>60 or "Not S60" in the Trim selection.

None of these are deal breakers of course since the total # of CPO cars is tiny overall.

Thanks!

 

[rog]

Great tool, thanks Hank!

One qq: I get the mail alerts always at some specific time at night (like they are coming from a timed batch/cron job). Shouldn't it be the case that e-mails are going out as soon as your backend finds a new matching entry?

Cheers,
Rog

 

[HankLloydRight]

Great tool, thanks Hank!

One qq: I get the mail alerts always at some specific time at night (like they are coming from a timed batch/cron job). Shouldn't it be the case that e-mails are going out as soon as your backend finds a new matching entry?

Cheers,
Rog

Yes, for now that is happening at around 5am, and I'm not sure why. The regular updates are still happening, and you will be alerted if a new car pops up (or the price changes), but overnight for some reason I haven't been able to determine -- ALL cars are being updated (removed/added back) triggering the alerts. I plan to look into this more fully this next week and figure out what's causing the trigger, and find a way to stop it.

 

[rog]

Thanks Hank! Only noticed now that I got repeated alerts for the same cars, despite price (or anything else) changing. Oh well, it's kind of a fun activity every morning to go through them :biggrin:

 

[Skotty]

The column filters are what make this tool great. It would be even greater if you could multi-select options from the filters. For example, I want grey leather seats, but I don't care if they are nappa, performance, etc.; I just want them to be grey. Can't review the options easily if I can only select one option at a time.

Looking back, I see that there is no multi-select because it's not supported by the filtering tool you are using. What kind of tool is it? Maybe it can be modified to support multi-select. I might even be willing to take a look at it (I'm a web app developer).

EDIT -- Actually, I can just examine the page source myself. No need to tell me.

EDIT AGAIN -- Looks like JQuery DataTable? I do see some support for muti-select lists. Would need to review versions and stuff to see what would be required to utilize it. Here's an example (see the CSS grade dropdown; checkboxes perhaps not quite as classy but it works; might need thorough testing though, drop down filtering seems buggy at first glance):

Possibly buggy implementation: Using DataTable with column filter plugin - Multi-select

This one works in testing so far, not sure what all is different (other than it is r82 rather than r80): Using DataTable with column filter plugin - Multi-select

 

[Skotty]

If you look at the multi-select implementation (for r82 -- Using DataTable with column filter plugin - Multi-select), note that their display of the code at the bottom is NOT what they are actually doing. If you actually look at the code, instead of this:

$(document).ready(function(){
$('#example').dataTable()
.columnFilter({
aoColumns: [ { type: "select", values: [ 'Gecko', 'Trident', 'KHTML', 'Misc', 'Presto', 'Webkit', 'Tasman'] },
{ type: "text" },
null,
{ type: "number" },
{ type: "select" }
]

});
});


It's actually doing this:

$(document).ready(function(){
$('#example').dataTable()
.columnFilter({
aoColumns: [ { type: "select", multiple: true, values: [ 'Gecko', 'Trident "New"', 'Trident', 'KHTML', 'Misc', 'Presto', 'Webkit', 'Tasman'], selected: 'Misc' },
{ type: "text" },
{ type: "select", multiple: true, sSelector : "#filterPlatform", values: [ 'Win XP', 'Win 95+', 'S60', 'OSX.2+', 'OSX.3+', 'Text only' ] },
{ type: "number" },
{ type: "select", multiple: true }
]

});
//$("select").multiselect({
$("table#example tfoot tr th#cssFilter").find("select").multiselect({
selectedList: 1,
multiple: true,
minWidth: "100",
height: "auto"
});//.multiselectfilter();
});

And of course, need the actual script for multi-select support:

<script src="media/js/jquery.multiselect.js" type="text/javascript"></script>


There's also an extra import, not sure if it's critical or not:

@import "media/css/jquery.multiselect.css";

 

[Skotty]

On closer inspection, I see you are potentially further confined by using DataTables CDN hosting of some of the datatables scripts. I think it's still doable, even if CDN isn't hosting the multi-select plug-in (I didn't see it at first glance), though there may be some integration issues to work through. Also might be worth recommending to the DataTables CDN folks to add the multi-select filtering plugin.

 

[Superloud]

Hi Hank,

First of all, I'd just like to say thanks. I signed up for the full 12 month Signature package. much appreciated!

I skimmed through all 30 pages of this thread. I know I'm duplicating some suggestions for improving your
tool, but I figure it's good for you to know how badly people want certain things so you can weigh that against
how annoying it would be for you to implement.

1) Ability to add "NO" search criteria
A lot of others have said this. While some options are deal breakers if the car doesn't have it, some things
are deal breakers if the car *does* have it (i.e. certain colors). A better way would be to support multi-select
as others have said. So...I'm not saying anything new here. Just adding to the push to solve this.

2) Column names down at bottom (and Y/N selectors at top too?)
When I use your site on my phone especially, I lose track of what column is which. I scroll way down, and
then forget which column corresponds to which feature. Why not simply add a duplicate row of column names
down at the bottom?
And even better, add another row of Y/N selector boxes up at the top so I can tweak it from either end?

3) Ability to see ALL entries
Someone else mentioned 100 entries can in some cases be too few

4) Ability to edit Alerts
Already mentioned, I know.

5) ability to see # of days at each price
Was already mentioned. But I'd really LOVE when hovering over the Delta symbol, for it to say:
Previous price for this VIN: $88k (14 days) $84k (10 days) $80k (7 days)

6) Original msrp estimator?
I know it's super hard to do this, since option costs are always changing. But it would be crazy good to be able to
see an estimate of original MSRP along with something that says the given car is let's say 62% of original MSRP.
I'm sure there are people that are kind of shopping on "value" as well as actual cost.
If it were me, I'd take a real crude stab at it. I'd make a table with model years across the top (ignoring the fact that prices
sometimes change mid-year), and each row would look like:
S60 base price:
S70 base price:
S70D base price:
...
P90D base price: (this for example would be N/A for older model years)
pano roof price:
XXX paint price:
....
tech pkg price:
air suspension price:
...
delivery price: (is $1,200 now but was probably less in 2012)

So for each car, you already have a list of all options, then for each option you just go to your table, pluck the value and add them all up.
You could even publish this table and folks might be able to tell you if any values are wrong.

thanks again!

 

[HankLloydRight]

Thanks for your subscription and feedback!

I'll try to address each one:

1) Ability to add "NO" search criteria -- I do plan to add this to the Alerts in the future.

2) Column names down at bottom (and Y/N selectors at top too?) -- I've already tried this several different ways -- due to the way the filters are created dynamically, I can't move them to the top.. and likewise, I can't repeat the column names in the footer (you can get one or the other, but not both!).

3) Ability to see ALL entries -- for subscribers, I added a "1000" option to show them all.

4) Ability to edit Alerts -- yes, someday

5) ability to see # of days at each price -- I'll investigate to see about this. The price changes are kind of erratic (frequent and small changes) so I'm not sure how much extra value this would add


6) Original msrp estimator? -- there's no way I could do that.. scratch that - I could do it, it's extremely complicated, prices of each base model and options have changed frequently and significantly over time (also what options were options or standard also changed, and what options were in which package Tech, Premium, Lighting, etc).. so I could do it, but I would assign a confidence level of ZERO and a margin of error 100% to any number created. Any number conjured up this was would be so inaccurate as to be useful in any meaningful manner. Oh, and to add to that, as far as I know, there's no mapping of VIN range to actual MSRP base or option prices (bits and pieces are out there, but not in any complete way). That database would have to be created entirely by user submissions, and would only really work when fully populated with every base model and option price at that time for that VIN. And then, what's the price for VIN doesn't mean that's the same price for VIN +/- 1. The only way to really get the original MSRP is to get the original MVPA for that VIN. Or ask Tesla.








- - - Updated - - -


I also wanted to add, that I designed the site to be a desktop/browser app -- I knew that due to the wide table design, and wall of data presented, that using on a phone or small tablet just wouldn't work, so I didn't even try to make it phone-friendly. So if you have problems using on a phone, please realize it wasn't designed for that platform due to the nature of the data presented. It does work pretty well on my iPad mini (and larger), so keep that in mind.

That said, and I've asked previously, if anyone knows of a native mobile app that has a unique way of presenting wide tabular data, please let me know, and I can look into a native app that's easier to use than the desktop browser version.

- - - Updated - - -


and "One more thing...".. I think I fixed the problem with all the cars being reset each night and triggering repeat alerts.

So that shouldn't be a problem any longer.

 

[swgdan]

In the members historical I'm getting: DataTables warning: table id=sold - Requested unknown parameter '22' for row 0. For more information about this error, please see 4. Warning: Requested unknown parameter