I saw this gap in the market over fifteen years ago and have exploited it ever since. This latest version of our system has not only taken over four years to develop but has taken us to a whole new level.
Please feel free to take a test drive. You will need access to a Premium account where many of the features are unlocked particularly in 'My Garage'. Registration to GAUK Motors is free and encouraged. Users are then encouraged to upgrade via various user action triggers, automated emails and alerts.
Media and interested parties please Contact Us for Premuim access
MAIN CONTACT
Paul Tranter
GAUK Media Ltd
"Life's Too Short To Think Small"
GAUK Motors is on a journey and we can’t wait to have you onboard so have a read of this article, hop in and let’s do some skids, drifts and big, fat burnouts together!
Motors! … By far the biggest marketplace. Millions upon millions of vehicles are sold across the Globe each year, Terabytes of information published daily.
According to SMMT in the UK alone there were 2.69 million registrations of vehicles and 8 million used cars sold in 2016. The automotive industry is a vital part of the economy accounting for more than £77.5 billion turnover and £18.9 billion value added.’ The trend continues.
GAUK aims to unlock the huge untapped potential in the digital motoring world (there are over 400 million motoring fans on Facebook alone – making cars and automotive a more popular category than gaming, football or news) who until now have not had a global digital platform that delivers reliable, accurate search and automotive data on a global scale.
Almost two years ago we embarked upon an incredible journey with one aim in mind – to make life just that little bit easier when tracking down your perfect motor.
Now the definition of ‘perfect’ will mean different things to different people. One person might be looking for the most powerful vehicle in its class, another may be looking for that perfect colour, another may be looking for the perfect price and another may be looking for the rarest of the rare.
We set out to provide a platform that will help anyone find their Perfect Ride …
Now GAUK Gen4 Software is set to power aggregation across a number of marketplaces
“GAUK! … that’s a weird name isn’t it?”
Government Auctions UK was an experiment.
Back when the Internet was a relatively new phenomenon, I had noticed a book selling extremely well through classifieds and in local papers and also noticed that there was no digital version.
The paperback was simply a directory of auction houses that dealt with Police and Government related auctions … there appeared to be something strangely alluring about buying the proceeds of crime, legally!
I read somewhere that the book had sold over 200,000 copies at £10 a pop. “Not a bad little earner,” I thought!
I did some research and put together my own database and by 2000 began publishing it on the Internet. Government Auctions UK could be bought online, as a printed document or downloaded as an ebook. Due to the limitations of the web in those days it was pretty basic, yet gave people a starting point, a place from where they could enter the ‘secretive’ world of Government and Police Auctions.
The cool part was, there were a number of publishers advertising across the press for their Government Auction info books. When people began looking online, I was there to be found!
I then progressed by teaming up with a local web agency who built a website with a searchable directory. There were no sophisticated features, yet it contained everything someone needed to track down local ‘No Reserve’ auctions easily. The biggest innovation was that I managed to secure the directory behind a password protected member’s area that could only be accessed via a subscription payment.
It sold well and over the following couple of years proved to be a great success. The Government Auctions UK website took on a life of its own, growing organically through search engine exposure and by word of mouth. However, it became apparent that visitors wanted a grander product than a directory of auction houses so as the web grew more technical, GAUK (as it became known) programmers started to develop a system to better deliver the auction information.
What’s coming up at those auctions, what are the dates and times? … that’s what people wanted!
Finding specific auction information on the net was (and still is) tedious and frustrating. Firstly, to find the auction houses, you need to do a Google search. Google will present you with a list of links ranked by their almighty algorithm created to index every website in the world in every country, covering every niche.
From the pages of Google links you have to decide which one best suits your needs (because Google barely gets it right!) and follow them into each website. Then you have to navigate your way to the information you want within different websites all with different layouts.
To further compound the issue, there are over two thousand auctioneers in the UK alone.
Unfortunately, due to the mysterious Google algorithm, only a fraction of those auctioneers can even be found.
It was this demand that drove site development towards something exponentially more comprehensive and targeted towards a very specialised niche. We set out to develop a platform that would display ALL the lots from ALL the different auctioneers in one easy to use, searchable app.
Furthermore, we needed to do this automatically because frankly, auctioneers just don’t have the time or the resources to upload catalogues to third party sites. They do however, religiously update their own!
We spent a couple of years building the second generation of GAUK search and were pleased with the result. Demand was strong, the site looked good, was profitable and we knew we were onto something special.
But as the Government Auctions website grew, we began to realise just how big a task we were up against. Going back to the core issue, it was the disparity and diversity of the information we were collating that was causing major problems.
There were platforms out there and we noticed that when auctioneers did post, they only advertised a fraction of their inventory and despite all our efforts and the obvious benefits, we just couldn’t get them to spend yet more time updating ours. Despite this they always updated their own websites, so we developed a team of data input staff to do the job for them using the data they posted. We developed a data management interface to control the tasks and there was even a data manager who monitored quality. This worked well for a limited number of sites but as we rolled out the concept inevitably, human errors compounded and grew exponentially.
By the third generation of GAUK we’d managed to cover a large percentage of auctioneers in the UK … but, and it was a great big hulking BUT … if we were to expand to our planned coverage of ALL auctions in Europe and the Americas a better solution had to be developed.
A couple more years of R&D and development, the fourth generation platform is built: GAUK Gen4. GAUKMotors.co.uk is the result and Stage One of a planned rollout of the new platform over the next three years.
Why Motors?
When we analysed the traffic at Government Auctions it became clear that Motors and Real Estate were by far the most popular categories, so we chose to develop Motors because we love em!
Hundreds of websites, hundreds of thousands of
cars, vans, commercials, plant & machinery and vehicles.
Why spend hours scouring the net for your perfect vehicle when GAUK Motors can do it for you in seconds?
Our proprietary software automatically monitors hundreds of websites aggregating hundreds of thousands of vehicles into a single, searchable database. Customise your car feeds to display only what you’re looking for in My Garage … Simple!
DEVELOPMENT SCHEDULE :: ALL Vehicles For Sale in UK, USA By Location By 2019
- GAUK Motors UK: Click Here
- GAUK Motors UK:
All UK Auctions Covered 2017 - GAUK Motors UK:
Classifieds now live. Full coverage July 2017 - GAUK Auctions UK:
Launched April 2018 - GAUK Motors UK: Dealers Planned launch Jan 2020
- GAUK Motors USA: Launching early 2020
More Vehicles In One Place …
GAUK Motors, National Automotive Search Engine
GAUK Motors Delivers The BEST DEALS On Cars, Vans And Commercial Vehicles
Simply put, GAUK Motors has done the hard work so searchers don’t have to!
Each day our software gathers real-time listings from literally hundreds of websites and collates it into a single, easy to use platform. We list vehicles from dealers, private sales and car auctions.
- Real time inventory
- Updated hourly
- Dates and times of upcoming sales
- Vehicles at auction
- Vehicles in classifieds
- Vehicles from dealers
- Every town covered
- Every state covered
- Search, save & compare dashboard
- Historical and current valuations
- Spec & Stats for every vehicle ever built
- Contact sellers directly
The Platform
GAUK has been proven and tested over many years, it has grown from the ground up, in the trenches and is absolutely rock solid.
When starting a new venture you can only ‘guess’ at what you may face in the future based on what you’ve read and maybe some personal experiences.
They say ‘it’s the truck you don’t see that runs you over!’
With a project as complex as ours, there are literally hundreds of really, really big trucks that can and will turn you into a sticky stain on the tar seal.
Avoid the trucks and just when you think you’ve got it right and the people start to visit, that very success becomes your downfall. You find you’ve coded a section in a zillion lines of code badly, or not anticipated server loads or not crunched those images or missed an important data callback or … it goes on and on.
A perfect example was that of a startup called Wheedle here in New Zealand. It was meant as a competitor to our version of eBay, called TradeMe. It was backed to the tune of $10M.
All went well until launch. The publicity was huge with news stories and press interest driving traffic. Vulnerabilities started as cracks that rapidly developed into chasms until the framework crashed completely. Hundreds of thousands of interested and potentially paying customers were met with the ‘page loading wheel of death’.
The only solution was to go back to the drawing board and rebuild the core architecture, which didn’t happen and now Wheedle has joined the regretful list of a million nearly-rans!
The GAUK concept was the easy part, putting it together has taken something pretty special, which is up and running, tested and ready for roll out.
Speed, Usability & Accuracy
When we began programming GAUK Motors we already had a wealth of experience. Forget the bells and whistles, ‘getting the result’ is at the top of every survey regarding customer satisfaction. People simply want to find what they’re looking for.
Not only have we built GAUK Motors with our trifecta at the top of the brief, we end every programming phase by going back and checking the flow. It’s something we’ll keep doing as we grow. As for speed, we cache and optimise every element of the site. Faster, bigger stronger!
So How Did We Do it? GAUK Gen4
GAUK Motors HAD to be 100% automated. Humans just aren’t up to the job!
They require unnecessary things like coffee breaks and lunch and sleep, they want to talk to each other and check their social media and then they lose concentration and make mistakes.
No! GAUK software needed to iron out those inaccuracy bugs.
The first major decision was the programming framework. Without getting geeky we chose PHP and Laravel. Many developers prefer Laravel over other frameworks because of the performance, features and scalability it offers. It has been the perfect architecture for our needs. GAUK Motors runs on the very latest releases and is updated to stay current.
The platform is not only built to look sexy and deliver a sophisticated user experience, it also has to do the heavy lifting. GAUK Gen4 has to manage and collate data from multiple sources and output it into a beautiful, elegant, intuitive platform. That output also has be mobile and web based.
Yet that’s only HALF the story!
How to input that data?
Remember, we’ve been here before and data input was our Nemesis.
To say that every website is different is an understatement … in reality, 'automation' is extraordinarily difficult to achieve.
The solution: More programmers.
We now have a small, yet scaleable team who write proprietary scripts for each and every website we feature. That script has a feather-light touch on the host. Scripts are staggered to run and maintain a balanced load so as to not slow down the servers. The results are then fed into our main database and in turn output seamlessly to the end user.
Each website we feature is set up as a ‘feed’. Each feed can be customised by the user and monitored in My Garage. Users can customise feeds with any number or variants to find that perfect Motor and they can set up as many feeds as they like (depending on subscription options of course).
Users can set up alerts linked to their customised feeds so that they never miss that perfect motor.
Over time, My Garage will become an invaluable and sophisticated interface allowing users to manage multiple feeds from multiple sources. Manage vehicles and all the associated data. They’ll never miss a motoring bargain ever!
About the Subscription Model
(Credit: entrepreneur.com)
Why You Should Use a Subscription Business Model
Since consumer buying habits are trending toward more simple and hassle-free shopping experiences, more and more companies are jumping into the subscription space and seeing incredible growth. Recently, Dollar Shave Club was expected to generate $60 million in revenue, nearly tripling its previous year's revenue. Even more impressive, Honest Company was expected to bring in $150 million in revenue, landing the business a $1billion valuation.
When we look at the success of software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies, many of which are offering monthly or annual service subscriptions and pulling in multi-billion valuations -- DropBox and Salesforce.com -- it's more evident than ever that customers prefer subscriptions. Yet professional service industries are falling behind.
Valuable for the company ... and the customer
The subscription model owes its success to the optimal balance of value it provides to both the company and the customer.
For customers, the value lies in the convenience. First, there’s the autopilot simplicity of subscriptions that removes the thinking out of a purchase decision. Subscribers never have to remember to reorder every month, which gives them the reassurance that they will have whatever they need before they actually need it. Everything arrives to your door like magic, removing the hassle of making a trip to the store or website to place an order. Second, subscriptions offer a flat rate which helps customers stay within their budget ... always. Lastly, subscriptions usually bring added value to the customer through bundling or getting it all for the price of one.
For businesses, the value of a subscription is the ability to predict revenue through recurring sales. In fact, according to John Warrillow, creator of The Value Builder System, recurring revenue is perhaps one of the most compelling factors in a company valuation.
“The more guaranteed revenue you can offer a potential acquirer, the more valuable your business is going to be," Warrillow says. "Because a high percentage of the revenue of a subscription-based business is recurring, its value will be up to eight times that of a comparable business with very little recurring revenue.”
This consistency in revenue also allows subscription-based companies to easily calculate the lifetime value of a customer, manage inventory, offer simple pricing and many other business benefits.
Positive impact of a service-based business
1. Flexibility
Subscriptions allow a company to plan resources and predict revenue. Service subscriptions allow you to be flexible in your tactics without having inconsistent service due to recalculating costs. It gives your company the ability to provide different types of services, not just deliverables.
2. Ability to scale
Subscriptions allow clients the security of knowing that everything is month-to-month, and nothing is set in stone . As a company, subscriptions also allow you to scale if you continue to add value to the client and impact their bottom line.
3. Stronger relationships
The subscription model allows a service provider to grow a relationship with the client and cater to their business or design needs as they change. It builds a substantial level of trust since the client knows that you have their best interests in mind and understand their business.
Moreover, it also forces service providers to be accountable in their client relationships. In a project, the goal is to finish, whereas with a subscription, the goal is to accomplish the objective -- and continue to provide value over time. We must always be pushing for innovation and exploring ways to make a greater impact, to be proactive instead of reactive.
The Most Beautiful and Comprehensive Source of Vehicle Information
on the Planet to Enhance the Vehicle Listings
- Probably EVERY vehicle manufacturer from around the world
- Probably EVERY motorcycle manufacturer from around the world
- Tens of thousands of vehicle models and variants …
When building GAUK Motors we wanted to ensure visitors stay engaged. There’s must be nothing more demoralising than spending $millions developing a site only to check the stats and see a bounce rate of 95%.
Stats and descriptions for every make and model since Carl Benz patented the first gas guzzler is a pretty big aspiration. We began searching for a comprehensive source of vehicle specifications to enhance the listings. Unfortunately, the sources we found were either incomplete or lacking in accurate data. Then serendipity played her hand and we were given the contact of a rather reclusive character from Eastern Europe who held a lifelong obsession with building database spreadsheets. A deal was done and Motorpedia was launched … it is the most detailed vehicle database to exist on internet.
The largest rival database currently claims 490,000 data points, Motorpedia dwarfs that.
The database currently boasts detailed and statistical coverage of:
- Almost 350 Vehicle Manufacturers from around the world
- Nearly 450 Motorcycle Manufacturers from around the world
- Almost 3300 Vehicle Models
- Almost 18000 Model Variants
But that was only the beginning!
Wikipedia was the most comprehensive resource for accurate information and there’s literally thousands of pages dedicated to vehicles, it’s also a pain in the butt to find them and is pretty damn ugly!
Even when you do start a search you have to know exactly what you’re looking for, otherwise (as with Google) you end up scrolling through pages of search results, disambiguation and totally irrelevant garbage … and often when you do find the page, you’ll find all the models jumbled together. Wikipedia however, does encourage developers to use the information through what’s called creative commons licensing and so we set about creating a better motoring encyclopedia.
First, we took our vast BigData as a baseline and began manually adding a Wikipedia page to each manufacturer. Even this wasn’t easy as layout and pages are not uniform. A special script was written that takes a Wikipedia page, cleans it of all irrelevant, ugly stuff and spits out something that’s finally of a high enough quality for GAUK.
Then we embarked upon the monumental task of creating a page for every model ever built. Not only did we have to create almost eighteen thousand pages, but in the cases of models with multiple generations we had to create further individual pages for each generation and to top it off, find a stunning, royalty free image to feature.
Motorpedia is 90% complete and more information is added daily. Development goals for Motorpedia:
- All vehicle manufacturers … worldwide
- All models of vehicle and motorcycle
- Complete specification for every model
- Owner’s manual download for every vehicle
- Owner’s and car builders gallery and vehicle showcase describing the build
- Available parts for each vehicle
We think the result is stunning and a legacy we’re proud of … but there’s still such a long way to go with a host of improvements planned.
GAUK Gen4 Software Licencing
The fastest growing and most profitable sector on the Internet is specialised search and aggregation.
The major search engines, although dominant, really don’t do a great job at specialised search. They’ve developed their algorithms to be a one-stop-fix-all solution. The same formulae is applied, no matter what we’re looking for and if a target website that holds the gold does not conform to that algorithm, valuable beer time is wasted trolling through pages and pages and pages of links … who wants that!!!!
Year by year Google becomes more out of date and LESS accurate.
In the old days we could tweak a website and enjoy the rewards as it rose to top rankings. Then the spammers learned these tricks so that when you typed in ‘vehicle insurance’ you’d instead get viagra and penis enlargement sites at number one!
Google is at war trying to make results more relevant using mathematics whilst the spammers are only one step behind. Unfortunately, high quality websites become collateral simply because they’re not ‘mathematically compliant’, they get shoved down the ranks and searchers can’t find them. The engine currently puts bias towards pages that are established and well read. That, by definition results on older information ranking higher. How many times have I began reading a fix for something that Google presented at the top of the search then noticed after five minutes of reading that the page is three years old!
We regularly check our auction directories for accuracy and latest auction dates by visiting auctioneers’ sites. Over the last year we cleaned out over three hundred listings because the companies had gone out of business. Yet, there in pride of place on Google, is all that dead information. No one is cleaning it out!
At the dawn of search, websites were ranked and checked by humans, but as things grew and algorithms became more sophisticated, automation took over. The new trend is moving back to smaller, more accurate aggregators and search tools. When you do a search through GAUK Motors an actual, real human has checked and set up every single result. Our goals is that not a single second of your time is wasted digging through irrelevant crap.
GAUK Motors is powered by, what we believe to be the most advanced, highly engineered, aggregation software ever built.
To get accurate listings, GAUK Motors mechanics do the donkey work and fettling ensuring results are categorised and filtered to match search parameters … life becomes just that slightly bit better!
GAUK has been in the auction niche for many years and we chose to launch in an even more specific marketplace with Motors.
Although we chose motors, there are literally thousands of niches we could have chosen and we simply will not be able develop them all.
It’s a dilemma because we developed GAUK Gen4 to make life simpler and better for searchers … The answer?
LICENCE GAUK GEN4.
MISSION STATEMENT:
WE STRIVE TO DO THE VERY BEST IN ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING WE DO
Currently, there are just three petrolheads at GAUK and I’m so proud of what we’ve achieved so far.
- We have myself Paul Tranter MFWIC
- My son Jake, Commander in Chief of Motorpedia and Social Media
- Dave, Mysterious and Magical Code Bender
I’ve worked with Dave for almost fifteen years now and created some pretty exciting projects. We’ve enjoyed the highs and lows of the furious pace of Internet life. We’ve exulted in projects that have reached top ten thousand rankings in the world (Alexa) … and we’ve cried as we’ve seen those servers burn!
We’ve endured the monotony and frustration of endless programming dullness and being motivated by seeing those project come to life. What we look forward to most is simple success … just to see this project, so many years in the making, take its next big step.
PAUL BIO
Paul was born in the UK and went to school, college and then polytechnic in beautiful Cornwall finally graduating with a HND in Art Direction and Advertising. After being forced to move to London in search of a work placement because this was where the agencies were based, he soon realised that ‘The Smog’ was not where he was going to spend the rest of his life! So after all those years getting educated he left the UK at the tender age of twenty. After various non-advertising related jobs in the Canary Islands he ended up in Greece where he set up as a sign writer and was introduced to sailing. This was to become a lifelong passion as Paul accumulated many thousands of sea miles cruising, racing and delivering yachts as a freelance skipper … and that would have been that, spending his years sailing the seven seas but he felt he needed something more fulfilling.
He chose direct marketing and publishing as this catered to his skill set and fitted into his transient lifestyle. Paul came up with the ideas and outsourced the work, which was all managed from a laptop whilst sipping Sangria in Spain or Rum Punch in the Caribbean.
The first venture into publishing was in 1999 with a series of wholesale related directories known as Sourcebook. These detailed trade sources worldwide. During this time he built other websites that would hone his Internet marketing skills; skills that contribute to the success of GAUK in these increasingly competitive times.
Paul has operated many online businesses from software services and publishing services through to full blown membership websites with one seeing members total over 1,200,000 and another broaching the magical top 10,000 ranking in Alexa.com.
You don’t develop fast growing businesses and manage the growth without making some mistakes. But those experiences have been taken on board, learned from and the knowledge used to ensure the very best is achieved for clients.
Over the years and under various guises and pen names, Paul has appeared on national television, radio and in various publications. He has worked with many of the top Internet Marketers on joint venture partnerships and if he’s not been behind some of the busiest sites in the Internet Marketing niche since its inception, he’s helped promote them.
After spending a number of years based mostly in Cyprus, Paul now lives with his family in New Zealand where he is developing a strong team to manage the growth and expansion of the GAUK brand worldwide.
What Next?
Build it and they will come
We’ve built it, they are coming, but we need to deliver the best experience possible and that means more of everything.
NEXT STEPS
Moving on I would personally like to welcome you aboard GAUK's very own Neurbering and look forward to many adrenaline filled times over the coming years.
