While Leavens Volkswagen is visually a very good design, you have to click thought 3 pages just to view their 16 cars. Last review you had to click though 5 pages to see 25 vehicles.
If each of these cars were displayed with just the basic information of make, model, year, mileage and price they could have been all viewed on one page. Then if the customer is interested in one of the cars they can click on that line and it would open another page with further information.
Courtesy Ford Lincoln makes the mistake of sorting their vehicles on stock number and don't include the make of the car. The inventory layout on the Nice Car site is just too rough.
The Mercedes-Benz site which in their last review had 10 of there southern Ontario car dealers together, is no longer doing that. They have not divided up their 10 cars into 5 different groups and you have click in and out of each group to see everything that they have. They dropped down 2 rating points.
I wonder over the years how many cars were missed by prospective customers because they didn't go though each and every one of the menus. Design mistakes can cost a company thousands of dollars.
There just is no reason not to display all your vehicles on one page where the customer can see everything you have in stock quickly and not miss some thing they be looking for because they didn't click through everything.
The One-Liners:
The next set of 5 dealers is where quality design shows up. Wilson Mitsubishi, Volvo of London and London Honda still makes the mistake of sorting by year bit they do have all their cars on one-liners.
On the Volvo of London site 10 out of their 12 vehicles were Volvo's and on Wilson Mitsubishi's site 21 of their 23 vehicles were Honda's so it doesn't make much different for them.
In the vehicle listings the vehicles should be sorted by Make, then Model, and after that by Year. This enables the person looking for a Honda Accord to find them all nicely grouped in one spot. This gets more important as the number of vehicles displayed increases.
Even after you have a proper inventory page to display your vehicles, the site will require maintenance. All your vehicles should be up to date. There is nothing like having a client phone up, or worse yet, come over to your lot, excited about finding just the car they are looking for, to hear, "oh we sold that one last month." You can expect them in many cases to be looking else where.That means when a vehicle is sold it should be marked sold or deleted the same day and not a couple of weeks later. Also there should be pictures in the detail page for each vehicle. For example of London Honda's 41 vehicles listed, there are no pictures for 12 of them.
Jumping ahead a bit, in both CarsInLondon.Com and Wilson's Used Cars their pages have the ability to mark the vehicles as AVAILABLE, SOLD or HELD.