We offered my wife’s car to Carvana for a quote to buy it. After entering the information they will send an email with their offer. She was surprised today by an email from Vroom, their competitor. The basic information on the car was correct although it did not list details of the options, etc. She would need to respond to Vroom’s email to get the quote. How did Vroom intercept the request to Carvana?
We use Microsoft Edge for the wife’s things to keep it separate from all my things on Firefox.
OK, I figured it out. I went through the history on Microsoft Edge and even though we searched for “sell my car to Carvana” it was actually the Vroom website that appeared at the top of the search. So they must pay to get their site listed first in such a search, I guess.
That’s almost undoubtedly what happened. In search engines like Google or Bing (and I would bet that Microsoft Edge uses Bing as its default search engine, unless you set it up otherwise), there’s something called “paid search ads,” which typically show up at the very top of the search results, with a little “Ad” notation next to the result (which is easy to miss).
And, yes, as the name implies, the advertisers pay to have their ads inserted based on certain keywords that get typed in by people doing searches.
I just did a search in Google on “carvana”, and this is what my results looked like. You’ll see that the first two items are paid ads (for Carvana, and for Vroom), and you don’t get to a non-paid result for Carvana until after the ads. When I used the same search term you did (“sell my car on carvana”), Carvana’s paid ad is the third one listed, after AutoLendersGo and Vroom.
