YBW online has no boats for sale!

J

JamesS

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This website seems to go from bad to worse.
Following the 'improvement' a couple of weeks ago when it became impossible to search for a specific boat without listing the whole lot, there seemed to be a degree of normality creeping in.

But today, there are no Moody's, Westerley's or any other boat for that matter capable of being listed in the brokerage section.

I hope no one is wasting their money listing on this forum.

I'm off to Appoloduck!
 
I really don't understand what is going on with the on-line boat for sale websites.

Boatsandoutboards has been going downhill for some time and is now so full of miscelleous adverts, it has become slow and unworkable for anyone looking for a boat.

YBW had something good, so changed it, presumably for financial reasons, to something hasn't been tested properly.


I've been using the following three and at least they seem to give meaningful results:
www.apolloduck.co.uk
www.theyachtmarket.com
www.boatshop24.co.uk

When will companies learn "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"?
 
hello to you
I have tried to send 2 emails to dan foley editor both bounced back.
I left 2 voice messages,no response.
This new version is slow you have to select country by country
its just not very good.
yacthworld.com is better more like the old version.
During the last 10 years i have bought 3 sailboats all overseas.
If you where ybw guess you would want to make money from your sponsors.
I buy 3 of there mags every month, no more and i will save myself £15.
 
Hi guys, the below is a copy of a previous response from me but should explain our position. Beebok, I'm sorry you haven't been able to get through to me, I've had a lot of correspondence regarding boats for sale and I thought I had replied to all of it, try me at dan_foley@ipcmedia.com

Please see the below, any further questions I will try and get back to you asap:

"Firstly, it's long been our aim to bring boats for sale in-house. The previous deal with Yachtworld sent our users to their site, so you can understand that at some stage we would want to provide a solution within YBW. What you see is now stage one of a new era for us.

Furthermore, by its very nature Yachtworld features a lot of boats from the US and a relatively small portion of our users are located there - the feedback we got from numerous pieces of research was that the vast majority would prefer to search boats from the UK and Europe. In the future our boats for sale may grow to incorporate boats from the US, but at the moment we are certainly not competing with Yachtworld here and if you are looking for US-based boats, it would be the best place to go.

As mentioned we are at stage one, what you might call a 'soft launch'. We are not actively promoting the section yet, because we fully expected there to be some bugs that we'd only find out about when we actually went live. We're ironing these out this week, so thanks again for the responses (and patience), we'll definitely take all this feedback into account going forward into phase two."

I apologise if you feel like you're getting a wall of silence, again I've tried to respond to every email or call I've had. Certainly the feedback we've had on the forums is invaluable and will help ensure that we do get the service right for our users.

Thanks,
Dan
 
Dan, why didn't you leave the Yachtworld link in place until you had ironed out the bugs? To launch a web product without thorough testing can only do harm to the reputation of YBW.
 
[ QUOTE ]
Dan, why didn't you leave the Yachtworld link in place until you had ironed out the bugs? To launch a web product without thorough testing can only do harm to the reputation of YBW.

[/ QUOTE ]

We ended our affiliation with yachtworld when we launched our new solution, and although we obviously did a great deal of testing some aspects couldn't be tested until launch. As you can imagine there is a lot of data being fed through so technical difficulties arise. As for usability issues raised in the forums, these will help us ensure we have the best product available as the boats for sale section evolves.
 
I have to say, the old site worked really well except it had some really irritating problems:-

1. It always defaulted to metres when searching

2. Would not set a default location i.e. search for yachts in Great Britain, or say Europe(Actually Europe was not an option).

3. It did not include any yachts being sold privately

What was good was you could sign up for notifications regarding a particular make/model and the large support the site had.
 
I've never bought a boat from the these lot, but their site is one of the best for looking at boats: excellent photos, informative (warts and all), and good consistent layout. I often pop in just to have a "butchers"...
 
[ QUOTE ]
"Firstly, it's long been our aim to bring boats for sale in-house."
......

"Furthermore, by its very nature Yachtworld features a lot of boats from the US and a relatively small portion of our users are located there - the feedback we got from numerous pieces of research was that the vast majority would prefer to search boats from the UK and Europe."

[/ QUOTE ]

I have difficulty with the feedback mentioned, and think it is spin designed to support the in-house aim.

i also thing that bringing it in-house is a short sighted mistake. Previously, using ybw boats for sale gave me access to a world of boats for sale, and I had no idea that I was using/linking an outside site. Now, using ybw boats for sale gives me access to almost nothing. In addition, I have discovered that I was using yachtworld, and that is what I will be using in future.

The forum search function has also been cocked up ... it wasnt good before, but now it is terrible.

Notwithstanding the above, the forums remain a great resource.
 
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
"Firstly, it's long been our aim to bring boats for sale in-house."
......

"Furthermore, by its very nature Yachtworld features a lot of boats from the US and a relatively small portion of our users are located there - the feedback we got from numerous pieces of research was that the vast majority would prefer to search boats from the UK and Europe."

[/ QUOTE ]

I have difficulty with the feedback mentioned, and think it is spin designed to support the in-house aim.

i also thing that bringing it in-house is a short sighted mistake. Previously, using ybw boats for sale gave me access to a world of boats for sale, and I had no idea that I was using/linking an outside site. Now, using ybw boats for sale gives me access to almost nothing. In addition, I have discovered that I was using yachtworld, and that is what I will be using in future.

The forum search function has also been cocked up ... it wasnt good before, but now it is terrible.

Notwithstanding the above, the forums remain a great resource.

[/ QUOTE ]

Hi Richard - no spin, that was what we learned from our research i.e. that the majority did not want their searches to include boats from outside Europe. I'm sorry you don't find the search satisfactory but we will be refining and improving it as we go forwards.

As for the forum search, I agree it's not nearly as good as previously. I was highly reluctant to change it but, for techincal reasons I won't go into, we had a choice between forums that worked with a poor search versus a forum that didn't work with a good search, so there was no choice really.

Of course, we intend on bringing back a search as was, but that will take time due to the software our forums use. Thanks for your response.

Dan.
 
I can't believe how bad the Brokerage Boats for Sale has become. I was searching for yachts for sale in Turkey. Just out of interest I looked for Bavs. If I specified 'Sail', I had no returns. If I specified 'All' I got ONE! ONE!!?? And that was a yacht! Unbelievable. Needless to say I won't bother looking there again. It's a complete joke.
Why oh why did you think that this would be an improvement?
 
[ QUOTE ]
I can't believe how bad the Brokerage Boats for Sale has become. I was searching for yachts for sale in Turkey. Just out of interest I looked for Bavs. If I specified 'Sail', I had no returns. If I specified 'All' I got ONE! ONE!!?? And that was a yacht! Unbelievable. Needless to say I won't bother looking there again. It's a complete joke.
Why oh why did you think that this would be an improvement?

[/ QUOTE ]

This was certainly a problem related to a bad information feed and is exactly the sort of problem we have encountered but fixed as quickly as possible. I've just done the same search and there are nearer 100 now.
 
hello dan,
i think you have a real issue,if i was a broker i would continue with the other site,why should they use ybw?
will you restrict brokers to your site only just like some of the property for sale web sites?
the boat market by comparison is small so as a buyer i would then use both sites.up till know i was more than happy with ybw site,it kept my interrest.
rgds alan
 
Well, Dan, lucky ol' you is all I can say.
I've just repeated the exercise today and got the same result as yesterday, i.e. ONE.
FWIW, I then searched for <u>any</u> make of <u>any</u> yacht for sale in Turkey and it returned 17 results. Now I don't know about you... but I would have bet my house that there are more than 17 yachts for sale in Turkey. And... interestingly.... amongst those 17 there was not the yacht that was returned in my earlier search for Bavs.
No ... I'm sorry Dan, this is just not a viable option. You've been sold a pup. I'm off to Yachtworld. Let me know if you ever get this sorted out.
And while you're at it...
The new Search function is complete pants now as well. /forums/images/graemlins/frown.gif
 
All the boats are available on yachtworld.com or boatshop24.co.uk or boatshop24.com, you will find all you need on those sites, cos that where the brokers remain.
 
Just looked at "your"website -absolutely brilliant obviously a keen photographer involved somewhere.
This is certainly the standard for all brokers to aspire to --some produce just complete rubbish photos and yacht info.
 
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