Entrepreneurs Fernando pinheiro and Michael Muller turned their bad experience selling cars into a thriving online business. they claim they can get a cheque for your car in 30 minutes.
It’s a big claim and these two entrepreneurs are sticking to it. Fernando Pinheiro and Michael Muller started an online shop to sell your secondhand car – that they say will take you 30 minutes – after they got screwed over trying to sell their own.
“Mike and I both had really really bad experiences and that’s why we wanted to start this business,” says Pinheiro.
Hence CarZar was born. Their business model is simple; fill an online form which uses national data and CarZar’s very own algorithm to find a price. If you accept the price, CarZar sends over an inspector and 30 minutes later, you have cash in hand.
It all came the hard way.
“I was moving from Cape Town to Johannesburg on a new job. I tried to sell my car privately online to get a higher price,” says Muller.
“It was a BMW 3 series, a 1996 model – I called it White Lightning. It had at some point overheated badly, and according to my mechanic it had put strain on the whole cooling system. So every month or two one of those parts would break,” says Muller.
It took weeks of wheeling and dealing online until Muller was willing to meet a buyer for R25,000 ($1,800).
“We met outside in some car park in Milnerton, with a dicey pub and an internet café. When we got there, he offered me R5,000 ($360) less, which was 20% of the car value. I rejected the offer.”
At this point Muller was in a fix. He was leaving for Johannesburg the next day.
“I didn’t have more time to go and find more people. He was an ugly guy. He was rude to me and then he had offered to pay less than what we had agreed upon. I really didnt want to sell him my car. As I stood on the pavement watching this guy pull off, I flagged him down and said fine.”
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