Most car sites, including the old VW.com, are glorified car brochures. They don’t help you find your dream car. They let you build a digital car that may or may not exist, then send you to dealerships with fingers crossed. And they don’t work for for shoppers who are used to e-commerce sites like Amazon and Zappos.
So the new VW.com takes cues from an unlikely source: online dating sites. It uses matchmaking functionality to help shoppers find their dream car based on whatever they’re looking for—a particular model, features, color, or even price. Then it pairs them with new or used Volkswagen cars in their area. Each car even has its own profile page with images, features, specs, and payment estimator—that’s more than 80,000 unique profile pages, and more than 10 million possible configured images.