When is ugly good on the web? When it's in the service of a brilliant, distinctive business: Ling's Cars.
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This U.K. car leasing site is ugly. It's like taking a brutal time trip to 1998. Flashing animations, banners, crazy fonts and headings… but it works! How well? The little business that Ling Valentine, a Chinese immigrant, started with her husband leases around £35 million worth of cars each year. Ling gets commission on each one, but she gets more than that. Her business gets reactions and loyalty from her customers: check out these letters.
Ling's Cars embodies the best advice anyone could take in creating a remarkable word-of-mouth business: whatever else you do, don't be boring. The whole site is driven by Ling's manic personality and sense of humor. Her business is a classic example of Seth Godin's purple cow – the distinctive, compelling business that is just different.
How many other ecommerce sites let you play hangman with car model names? Or let customers contribute their car lease-related poetry? Ling is a born self-publicist and knows how to make things fun for her customers. My favorite thing on the site is the hilarious build guide for the "Nuclear Missile Truck" that she created to advertise her site.
Under it all, of course, is a rock-solid business: the site boasts of quick response to customers and an efficient order handling process, all driven by software that Ling designed herself.
Can you imagine wanting to visit, much less talk about and share, a car leasing site? Me neither… but somehow Ling makes it work!
Wah!
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My God, what a review!! Usually I get people reviewing my site and I have to explain forever that it is about doing business with very high-ticket long buying cycle items. But you gettit! What a shame you don't live next door, I would hug you
You save me so much typing, Krim hahahaha!
Just one thing – I don't actually buy and sell £35m of cars, that's the retail value of the metal. I let the car dealers hold the monetary risk. I simply take a (usually 1%) commission, as low as can be so I just invoice a commission per car. £375,000 last year. But still not bad to bring in $500,000 from an "ugly" website
Low risk means low overheads means low prices.
Thanks so much for the blog post! There will be hundreds of things you haven't found, like my sitemap (crazy) http://www.lingscars.com/sitemap.php etc etc, but what the hell, nice to keep some surprises. We both know it's not about cars, it's about people really
Thanks again! Ling
Thanks for the comment Ling, and for clarifying about the £35m. I’ll correct that!
I love what you’ve done with the site. What’s “ugly” about it is really that it’s just so different at a glance, and that it breaks all the rules of design (I think this makes you sound badass personally… you break ALL THE RULES). I love that it doesn’t have a slick, polished look. There are a lot of sites that look polished and deliver an average or broken experience. Your colors and graphics look like you fed mescaline to a 1st year web developer, but the UI is actually really good, and you deliver a great experience.
Thanks again Ling!
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Interesting blog you got here but I can’t seem to find the RSS button.