Ms. Lo, 24, is a manager at an online freelance placement company and has been in the market for a used car for more than a year. She tried Craigslist, but found it difficult to trust strangers on the site. Car dealerships were worse. The sales employees were either inattentive or cloying, the finances opaque, and the whole process was time-consuming and inconvenient. At one dealership recently, a salesman asked Ms. Lo, “Are you here with your parents?”
So a few weeks ago, Ms. Lo did what anyone her age does when confronted with a hurdle in the real world: She escaped it virtually. Ms. Lo found a novel online dealership, Beepi, which acts as a broker between sellers and buyers of used automobiles and which holds the potential to alter the image of the perilous used-car market.