Car sharing analysis

1. Jacob Nine
Web Publishing
Enterprise Car Share Popularity & Traffic Analysis
WEBSITE OVERVIEW
 General Industry & Company Information
Overview: Car sharing is an industry that has seen much growth over the years.
According to an article from Earth Friends, “Between July 2013 and July 2014 the U.S. saw a
34% increase in the number of car sharing users, and studies indicate this number will continue to
climb” (Jones, 2018). So why is car sharing so popular? The answer is convenience, price and
being environmental friendly. Convenience is in high demand in the modern age of technology.
Car sharing is an industry that is being built through convenience through the use of smartphones.
Users of car sharing can access and use everything they need through smartphones like picking
cars and paying for the services. Affordability is something that also drives the car sharing
business. It can be much cheaper to use a car for a day or week at a time then paying for and
owning your own vehicle. Car sharing is also helpful to the environment because people are more
likely to use the cars for more than one trip, and they use them more effectively. So what are the
options we have as consumers for car sharing? While reading an article called “Shared Mobility
Comprehensive Guide 2018”, I found the four types of car sharing that companies will offer you.
The first one is called station based car sharing, which is a more traditional rental car service. This
is where your trip must start and end in the same location. Think of when you might rent a car for
vacation and you have to turn it in to the same location. Another type is one-way car sharing,
where the vehicle can be picked up at a company’s station, and returned at another. Another type

2. is a home area. According to the article home area is “A virtual fence where individuals have the
freedom to park their vehicle anywhere on permitted side-streets or company-marked parking
locations” (Navy, 2018). This type of car sharing is very popular in bigger cities with not a lot of
parking spaces, and gives the consumer more freedom than other options. The last type is free-
floating, which allows the consumer to pick up a vehicle and end the trip anywhere in the home
area. This option has the most freedom and can be very convenient to the consumer.
Now let’s look at the company Enterprise and one of their services Enterprise CarShare.
Enterprise is a company that allows people to rent cars for one way trips, long term trips or rent
business cars. They also control commercial fleet management, have commercial truck rentals and
have car sharing services. They have been around since 1957 and are considered an established
company. They are pretty new when it comes to the car sharing business compared to their
competitors. Enterprise CarShare focuses on membership plans that will attract both frequent and
less frequent consumers. Their keep it simple plan is $40 dollars a year and you get pretty good
rates after you pay the fee. They also offer a road warrior plan for frequent users that know about
how far they will be driving. You can pay $50 a month for a 10% discount on hourly and daily
rates, or you can pay $250 a month for a 15% discount on hourly and daily rates.
 Trust
Enterprise CarShare is fairly new to the car sharing business, but the company Enterprise has
been in the car business since 1957. Enterprise CarShare is backed by one of the leading car rental
businesses in the world, and they have a good name behind them. They first got into the car
sharing game in 2008 under the name WeCar, until in 2013 it was called Enterprise CarShare.
They appear in the news quite frequently. A lot of their news coverage is coming from more local
TV stations, especially when they have a new location in town. You will also see them in a lot of

3. travel websites, talking about what they offer, and often talking about what great costumer service
they have. Over the last year they have been featured on Forbes, and have seen appearances in
news outlets like the LA Times. Personally I would trust myself to put my credit card on their
website, and the URL has an https in the beginning, letting me know that it is a secured site.
According to ICANN WHOIS, a website that lets you know how old your domain is, says that the
Enterprise CarShare website is 7 years old. Knowing all of this information lets me know that I
can trust their website.
 Quality Content Assessment
 Credibility
When looking at website, knowing it is credible is very important. You want a website to have
unique content. This means that there is no other content like it, anywhere else. This includes
creating unique, text, images, ecommerce, infographics, video and audio, and charts/graphs.
Providing unique and fresh content is very import to a website popularity, and google loves
unique content. If a website wants to appear at the top of search engine results, they need to
produce unique content. I am using a tool from Siteliner.com that can look at your websites
content, and decide if it unique, common, or duplicated. Unique content is one of a kind, common
content is similar to others but not the same, and duplicate is copied from another site.
Above to the left is a graph of Enterprise CarShare’s content. Above to the right is a list of
duplicate websites. At first glance you might be concerned on the amount of duplicate content the

4. site has. But when you click on the duplicate website sources, you can see why this isn’t a
problem. Enterprise has many different locations and programs that have their own websites that
need to copy the information from the original website, which is given through communication
and then coding in the website. For example BYU’s website showed up in the list of duplicate
content, but they need to use the same information to put on their own page, since they have an on
campus location. In this case BYU probably got permission to post this to their website through
Enterprise. When wanting to find out if a website is credible, typos are a good tool to measure.
When I ran 100 pages of our website on Seochat.com’s online spell checker, I found some
interesting results. For about every 1000 words there would be about 1 possible misspelling.
Some of the most common misspellings were words like “carsharing” and “iphone”. Mistakes
like this are not very important to me because words like carsharing could be spelled different
when it comes to different companies, and it could be because the companies name is spelled like
that. For words like “iphone” it just shows that the writers might have not used a hyphen, or they
spelled it that way because Apple sells their products spelled as “iphone”. Overall the Enterprise
CarShare website is credible when it comes to unique content and not having too many typos in
their work.
 Value
Value is an important part of any website for a user. It is what keeps a user engaged in the
website, and gives them a reason to be on the website. When writing for a website this means
writing more than a simple description. You want to speak to your user as personally as possible.
Important things that add vaule to your website are helpful images, demos, having a ratings and
review system, and having good customer service. All of these will help your user feel liked they
are being helped, and will be less likely to leave your site due to confusion. If you have something

5. for the user to call or chat with an employee, the user will be much more likely to return. Having
reviews and ratings will let the user know what other users think about the products, and can
make more trusted purchases.
 Competing Site
For Enterprise CarShare, their competing site would have to be ZipCar.com. ZipCar has some
similarities and differences between Enterprise CarShare. ZipCar has round trip, and commuter
options for their consumers. The round trip lets you sign up, unlock by taping the windshield,
drive by the hour or by the day, and then makes you return it to its designated parking spot when
completed. The commuter option lets you sign up, drive the car wherever you want for the week,
through its dedicated spot, and then needs to be returned to its parking spot by that Friday.
Enterprise is very similar in the way they want you to get your car and return it. First you join
their membership and you will receive your membership card. You then log onto their app and
reserve a car. After that you hold your membership card up to the windshield sensor and it will
unlock your car for you to use. After you are done with your vehicle you return it and swipe the
card again to confirm you are done after you park it in its designated spot. The difference between
these two is that ZipCar’s Commuter option gives you more freedom of not having an hourly rate,
and instead a weekly rate.
Some differences in Enterprise CarShare and ZipCar is the amount of locations you have
to choose from. Enterprise CarShare has locations in 27 cities and more than 130 college
campuses. Zipcar has locations in 170 cities in 44 states, and is available on more than 300
college campuses. Enterprise CarShare has gas and insurance included like Zipcar, but when
comparing prices, the two are pretty different. I looked and found a Ford Focus in New York
City, one of the most expensive places in the United States, from both ZipCar and Enterprise

6. CarShare. With Enterprise CarShare you have to pay a $40 fee a year for their keep it simple plan,
which is for less frequent users. With this plan your ford focus drops to $8 to $9 an hour for your
car. ZipCar also has a plan called the exact same thing, the “Keep it Simple Plan”. The difference
is you pay seven dollars a month, which is $84 a year. You then get a standard rate of $10 an hour
for your car. Enterprise is both cheaper yearly and hourly compared to ZipCar.
Traffic Analysis
 Visit Analysis
 Definitions: As you can see above, the 6 month average monthly visits is 167,000 for
Enterprise, and 1,500,000 for ZipCar. A visit is the number of times users visited during
the timeframe. Visitors are counted in months. The 6 month average unique visitors is
96,000 for Enterprise, and 740,500 for ZipCar. A unique visitor is an individual person
visiting the website, regardless of how many times they visit. The Average visits per
unique visitor came out to 1.74 for Enterprise and 2.03 for ZipCar. Visits per unique
visitor is how many visits an individual person makes on the website.
 Comparison
At first glance you the numbers might be a huge difference between one another, but you
need to look at the shifts in visitors and how long both of the services have been around.
ZipCar has always been at the top with numbers, and Enterprise CarShare is fairly new to
the industry. This is why there is a big difference in the numbers. But when it comes to

7. shift in numbers, Enterprise CarShare is the winner. When you look at the numbers,
starting in July 2018, Enterprise had 150,000 visits, and Zipcar had 1,600,000 visits. By
December 2018 Enterprise had 112,900 visits and Zipcar had 1,100,000 visits. That is a
25% decrease for Enterprise, and around a 32% decrease for ZipCar. The chart below will
give you an idea of how their numbers have changed.
I believe that the numbers for both sites should not be discouraging. I believe that the decrease
has to do with the seasons changing. As it gets colder out less people will be using car sharing,
because I believe that a lot of people use it a part of their vacations, or when they want to go
somewhere and enjoy the weather, or because some people have more time in the summer.
 Engagement Analysis

8.  Bounce Rate
o The Bounce rate is when only one page is visited before exit. This is considered
good or bad, and depends what industry you are in, and what the objective of your
website is. If someone goes to a page and doesn’t like it for any reason they will
bounce. Someone could also bounce because they found exactly what they need,
which is what some companies might aim for. As you can see in the excel sheet
above, EnterpriseCarShare users bounce at 28.91% compared to 20.89% from
ZipCar users, which means EnterpriseCarShare.com users bounce more often by
8.02% when comparing the two.
o I believe that the bounce rate is not that great. I believe you want a low bounce
rate, especially in the service industry. The average for the service industry is 10%-
30%, which is lower than the overall web average of 45%. Your goal is to attract
the user in and wanting them to explore more pages and buy your service. One
thing that might be leading to the bounces would have to be the lack of reviews,
comments, or other user’s feedback. How would the user know what is good and
what others are thinking without a place for them to leave feedback?
o

9. In the picture above I show what the homepage looks like if you scroll down a bit. Nowhere, not
even in the menu do you find any reviews or feedback. This is important so others can build trust
from the website.
 Pageviews Per Visit & Average Visit Duration:
A pageview is how many pages a user visits during their session. Once they leave the site
their session is over and their pageviews are counted. The average visit duration is how long the
user’s session is. Once they leave the site it is over. EnterpriseCarShare.com has a page per visit
of 3.98 and an average visit duration of 3:34. ZipCar.com has a page per visit of 8.35 and an
average visit duration of 5:07.
I believe that the numbers for our site are low, especially when you compare it to other
similar sites. One thing that might make the user stay on the site longer and view more pages is
the amount of information about car sharing the website gives. On every page there seems to be
an explanation on what the program is about and how it works. This is very helpful to the user
and will encourage them to stay around and learn more about what they offer. As you can see
from the picture below, there is plenty of simple and effective explanations on how to get a
vehicle.

10.  Value Content & Engagement Improvement Recommendation:
I believe that the best content change the site could change is creating more personal maps and
pricing as soon as you are on the home page. When you go to ZipCar.com, as pictured below, you
scroll down and are hit with more personal content. Enterprise needs to change the way show
locations. At ZipCar you are presented with a live map the user can use. They also make the user
engage by making them change their city to find out more. The map is easy to use and very nice
looking.
Enterprise, pictured below, has a less interesting approach in my opinion. These images are nice,
but the map is much more interesting in my opinion. Although I would likely engage in the page
to look for more cities, ZipCar seems more personal and interactive, which is key to engagement.

11. Pricing upfront and giving the user options right away this very important to users. Enterprise
needs to be more upfront and personal with its pricing, and give the user options right away.
ZipCar, pictured below, has an excellent interactive pricing selector that the user can customize to
its needs. You can select what type of vehicle you want, how long you want it, and how far you
are going. It then adjust your price accordingly in real time.
When you scroll down to the cost of Enterprise CarShare, shown below, you are shown what
prices in a city would be.

12. The only personalization you have here is choosing the city, and not the cars and trip info, which
Enterprise needs to add. The users want to see the prices and choices they have right away.
Enterprise needs to do away with the “Become a Member” option so early in their site. Nobody
really even understands what becoming a member is right away. When you first see that option
instead of the personal info the user will become less interested. This is because “Become a
Member” feels like a chore you would have to fill out, and doesn’t give you the fun details about
your trip that you care about. The user first wants to think about what their service can provide for
them, and not fill out forms right away to become a member of something they know little about.
This is why EnterpriseCarShare.com might fail to catch some people, they first go for a business
approach and try to sell the user something they know little of. ZipCar,com does this better
because it is more personal to the user with options upfront and user engagement.

13. Works Cited:
“Enterprise CarShare.” Hourly Car Rental Locations - Enterprise CarShare, 2013,
www.enterprisecarshare.com/us/en/home.html.
Jones, Sally. “Car Sharing: Enterprise Carshare vs Zipcar vs car2go.” Earth's Friends, Earth's
Friends, 9 Oct. 2018, www.earthsfriends.com/enterprise-carshare-vs-zipcar-vs-car2go-vs-turo-vs-
getaround/.
Navy, Mike. “Shared Mobility Comprehensive Guide 2018 by Movmi.” Shared Mobility, 31 Jan.
2018, www.sharedmobility.news/shared-mobility-comprehensive-guide/#.