Website is visited by many people and businesses from different industries, thus is NOT possible to make everyone happy by offering a single vehicle database, or to predict what customers will visit me in the future and create suitable databases in advance.
If you think that these vehicle databases are stolen from somewhere and sold “as it is” like at other data providers, you are WRONG. As database developer and having over 20 years experience in researching car industry, plus high skills in data mining, I can customize already-made databases or create new databases according your requirements, for you and for future customers needing same thing.
Note: I am NOT a freelancer that you can hire anytime you want, I am a data provider creating USEFUL databases that I can sell via website to as many people is possible. Website traffic increased 10x from 2012 to 2018 and sales of ready-made projects grew accordingly so making custom projects is no longer required to finance my living, it became difficult to keep updates on-going for dozens databases, also website became overloaded with too many too similar databases thus new customers have trouble choosing right one to purchase. Due to this reason in 2018 I decided to STOP updates / abandon projects with less than 5 sales per year.
HDD crash of 1 October 2019 made me to put ON HOLD all custom projects requests, I went back on track in December 2019 and I am available again for customization existing databases, but I will start new projects ONLY IF at least 3 people demand certain database, and this in the spare time remained after updating high-selling databases. Do not expect me to delay update of a database with 100 active subscribers to create a custom database “just for you”.
Custom packages
I sell each database in several standard packages, for example Year-Make-Model-Trim-Specs have 3 column options: Trims, Basic Specs, Full Specs, and 2 rows options: all cars (1990-2021) and new cars only (2018-2021), making a total of 6 packages. But you can ask me to create a custom package if:
- You need more than 2018-2021, but also don’t want to pay big price for 1990-2018. For example you need 2010-2021.
- You need an additional column that is not included in Basic Specs package, but don’t want to pay big price of Full Specs package.
- You need only SUVs, only trucks, or only vehicles made by General Motors (Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, Geo, GMC, Oldsmobile, Pontiac, Saturn). Useful for people who want to buy a car and my database may help them making a decision. Note: for a selection of makes the price per row will be twice of normal price, so if you choose few makes that exceed 50% of total rows in database you will no longer get discount.
Pricing: I charge twice price per row when selling a database with filtered makes or body type, so if number of rows is more than half of total rows, you won’t get cheaper price than buying full database.
Note: if you buy custom packages you will NOT be notified automatically when updates are available and you will not be able to download them. If you need updates you need to contact me and I will email you.
Customization of existing data
FREE customization: rearranging the existing data, deleting the “bonus” cars not sold in Europe, translating technical terms, etc. Do not lose a FREE offer like this FUNNY customer!
Paid customization: if new data need to be added, but if your idea is great and makes the database better thus can be sold to more people, price will be LOWER.
Databases were originally made as stand-alone products intended for visualization in Excel, I was not expecting that people buy for web development or other applications. Until december 2012 I had only 2 databases with specs for sale: Car Database LITE (renamed Car Models Database) and Car Database BIG (renamed Car Models & Engines Database), plus the Car Models List offered FREE in Word format because I was in doubt that someone will ever pay for a simple list of models without technical specs…
… without realizing that there is audience of people looking for a car database to integrate in a website, so they do not need technical specs, they need just a list of models… but in Excel rather than Word!
– As soon as one customer (from Turkey) told me this (30 December 2012), I offered conversion of Car Models List.DOC (offered FREE) to .XLS for €20 but he did not agreed to pay, however I DONE IT and put it for sale for other people, for $29.60 – 2960 models / 103 brands. Surprisingly, in just one month 4 people bought such XLS list of models without specs, outselling the other 2 products. Many thanks to anonymous from Turkey.
– One American did not liked the just-launched Car Models List.XLS and told me to recompile it by making separate row for each year (5 February 2013), after a little talk and confusion, I DONE IT!
This format of database was very WEIRD for me as European, but later I realized that this is the standard format for North America market so I put it on sale for everyone as Car Models List US and it became a best-seller! Later renamed to Year-Make-Model.
Now I think that this guy from one month ago wanted the same thing, but instead of explaining me, he quitted like an idiot.
– An insurance company intending to buy Car Models & Engines Database suggested to add two extra columns for make and model beside full model name. DONE! (December 2012), this boosted sales a lot.
– Someone who purchased Car Models & Engines Database complained that cannot filter the table by fuel type (January 2013). DONE! I added an extra column for Fuel type without charging extra cost (it was originally not included because any reader can realize which is gasoline and which diesel, by model name). Now I am sad by thinking that I lost potential buyers who were needing Fuel type column too, they went away instead of telling me to add it?
– The BIGGEST job ever done by customer request (opposite of the original database made as personal interest), is the Car Tire Database. Initially I said NO to first customers, because would take 100 hours to enter tire size manually, but during 2013 I has been contacted by 4 customers demanding a Car Tire Database, so I decided to start adding tires in the Car Models Engines & Dimensions database. After completing 20% my website was hit by Google Penalty, lost 90% of traffic, lost interest in making new databases because potential of new customers was too low. Penalty ended in March 2014, traffic recovered.
A new customer wanted transmission, other customer wanted something else. I put Car tires on hold to decide what is best thing to do, and in mid-2014 I decided to add not just tires but ALL 40+ data fields from AutoKatalog car magazines.
I published a SAMPLE of the 40+ fields database, as marketing experiment, to see if anyone is interested in such big amount of data, and in 6 months found only 1 customer interested in 40+ columns (which in this case I would have abandoned the project) but numerous customers interested in specific data (mostly interested in tires, few in transmission, etc) encouraged me to continue. I launched for sale Car Models, Engines, Tires in May 2015 with 60% completion for tires, and finalized the 40+ fields database for 1990-present in October 2015, and put it on sale for 500 euro, a price at which I was not expecting many buyers, but I was wrong. Many people switched their choice to the bigger and more expensive database, and my income has been doubled.
There were many things that I could offer, but in early years I was not aware what I should offer due to people lazy to contact me and inform about their requirements
Creating totally new databases
A new era started in 2015, using web scraping software I can create new databases with minimum of effort, by writing scripts that visit a website at your choice, extract specific data and put it into an Excel database, in a matter of hours. See examples of projects done and their price.
Do not just tell me what data do you require and expect me to do research on the web to find that particular data. You need to provide URL of a website having required data and I will code a scraper that create a database with all data from the website you choose, which may be or may not be exactly the data you require.
Do not expect me to create databases with data that you cannot find public on internet, for example:
- Do not think that I can compile a table with number of cars sold in your country, breakdown by model, if your government is not tracking sales and making them public on the internet. Data need to be public somewhere in order to extract it and put into a database.
- Do not ask me to make database with dimensions of car lights, bumpers, windows, etc. Such dimensions are not provided in car manuals or anywhere in the web. If you sell such car parts, measuring yourself your own parts is the only solution.
- One of the weirdest requests was from a manufacturer of mosquito nets for 4-door cars, requesting a database with rear door window dimensions. No car manufacturer provide such info that is not on general interest… it needs to be measured manually on cars of his own customers.
- Do not ask for car owners database with name, address, email, phone number, insurance expiry date. Such database belongs to car dealerships and insurance companies and is NOT public, only their staff have access to it. However if you do a Google search “car owners database” you see at least 10 sites selling such personal data, all them from India, a country infamous for so-called email marketing, telemarketing and cold calling that us (westerns) we consider spamming. No wonder that 90% of people asking me for owner data were Indians. How these databases appeared on internet we do not know, probably corrupted employees tried to make extra money by selling via internet their company’s customer database. This is ILLEGAL and anyone distributing personal data risk to be fined or even jailed.
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