Staying in the Fast Lane

Not too long ago, shopping for a new car meant putting on a poker face, driving down to a local dealer and trying to glean as much information as you could from the window stickers before being subjected to a salesman and his "manager."

Nowadays, a majority of car owners do the bulk of their research online and walk into dealerships well informed and educated. With vehicle specs, reviews, histories and pricing at their fingertips, consumers have far more power than they had in the past. As Internet speeds increase, however, it seems that patience decreases: Every second lost to a slow-loading page could result in a lost customer.

With an inventory of more than a million vehicles from thousands of dealers around the country, Vehix.com is one of the major players in the automotive portal market. With the help of Akamai, it is adding more rich content to drive more business.

Launched in 1996 as a portal to help consumers with automotive research, Vehix.com now lists the inventories of some 5,000 dealers. It also features user-generated reviews, ratings, forums, blogs and a variety of articles, and the latest additions are videos that cover everything from crash and performance tests to tips and advice for car shoppers and owners.

Vehix.com welcomes more than two million unique visitors per month and earns its revenues from advertising and dealer affiliation fees. The website also has partnerships to provide content to Comcast, website affiliates such as Smartmoney.com and broadcast affiliates like the Scripps Television Group.

The web is becoming a critical tool for auto shoppers. According to a recent Cars Online report from Capgemini, 88 percent of consumers use the Internet to research vehicles, and many report using New Online Tools (Web 2.0) for opinions about specific vehicles, discussions with automotive experts and other consumers and news about the latest models. Many of them gravitate to Vehix.com, says chief technology officer Michael van Thiel, because the site has "a lot of unique content … that the other sites don't have."

Vehix.com visitors range from casual browsers to those interested in the site for its entertainment value and those seriously considering the purchase of a vehicle. It has expanded its offerings of rich content to appeal to the latter groups, and has also launched social media capabilities that allow visitors to create personal profiles that reflect their unique car preferences and opinions.

"Through our online community we've harnessed expert- and user-generated content, local shopping tools and ubiquitous vehicle inventory to confidently deliver a one-stop shopping experience for users unlike anything else available in the marketplace," says chief marketing officer Glenn Morey.

Despite the rapid advances in Internet technology and the advent of broadband, geography still plays a role in transmission speed. The farther a user is from the server hosting a website, the longer it will take for that site to load. And with up to 24 images of each vehicle and a multitude of videos, Vehix.com has a lot of files and information to store.