CarsForSale.com.....WOW

[Ryan Everson]

I have always brushed CarsForSale.com off as the company that roped dealers in with crazy cheap offers like "Free for your first 6 months, then just $99 /mo after that." A service that would get easily forgotten about and paid by your office out of habit.

But lately they've been churning out new features left and right - providing an incredible value for just $99/mo. I'm truly impressed.

Would I personally use them? No. But they make a ton of sense for small independents.

They are essentially all of these tools bundled together for $99 /mo

• Dealer.com
• Autotrader
• Homenet
• Vauto
• Vinsolutions
• DealerTrack
• Revolution Parts

Yes, for $99 /mo they include all of these features:

• CRM
• DMS
• Desking
• Website & SEO
• Inventory Management System
• Parts & Accessories E-Commerce Store
• Third Party Marketplace
• Reporting & Analytics

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying they are as good at websites as Dealer.com, as good at inventory management as vAuto, etc.

But we're comparing a $99 /mo tech stack to a $15,000 /mo tech stack.

I would love to see some of the legacy vendors start to release new features like this on the regular.

Not to mention their corporate office is pretty sick, apparently all of those $99's add up...


Full-size T-Rex in middle of office

NASCAR race car in lobby


CFO's bank vault office


Slide to go from 2nd to 1st floor


^ All of this in SOUTH DAKOTA

 

[Ryan Everson]

CarsForSale.com CRM Features


Sales Pipeline


Text Messaging Platform


Unified Customer Profile showing website shopping activity, leads, past sales, etc


Mobile App


Follow-Up Tasks


Custom Lead Routing


CRM Custom Fields

 

[Ryan Everson]

CarsForSale.com DMS Features



RouteOne / DealerTrack Integration


Trade Payoffs


F&I Products


E-Contracting

 

[Ryan Everson]

CarsForSale.com Inventory Management Features



VIN Decode with Standard / Optional Equipment Packages


ChatGPT Generated Vehicle Descriptions


Price to Market Analysis


Photo Management w/ Overlays


Inventory Feed Syndication


Buyers Guides & Window Stickers


Vehicle Addendums

 

[Ryan Everson]

CarsForSale.com Responsive Website Features


Updated Grid Design w/ Instant Filters


Drag & Drop Website Editor


Dynamic SEO


Custom Lead Form Builder


Parts & Accessories E-Commerce Store

 

[Alex Snyder]

I've been researching as a customer and continue to get their results in my organic Duck Duck Go SERP. However, when I click on their results, it is just an SEO landing page. A few times, I have not been able to click into a way to search for vehicles. I'm guessing they have some landing pages out there that are solely for SEO. It is a bad customer experience.

I'm no Google user, so take this as you will.

 

[Ryan Everson]

CarsForSale.com Inventory Exposure Features
CarsForSale.com Third Party Marketplace Listings


Google Cars for Sale Listings


Post Inventory to Facebook

 

[Ryan Everson]

I've been researching as a customer and continue to get their results in my organic Duck Duck Go SERP. However, when I click on their results, it is just an SEO landing page. A few times, I have not been able to click into a way to search for vehicles. I'm guessing they have some landing pages out there that are solely for SEO. It is a bad customer experience.

I'm no Google user, so take this as you will.

@Dan Sayer said it well "if huffy made a plane would you fly in it?"

I'm not very impressed by anything CarsForSale.com offers when you look at something they have as a standalone product. But when you take into account everything they offer for $99 /mo it's truly impressive.

It's not very often that you look at a vendor and think "wow, they could easily charge 5-10x that price."

And I think that's the point I'm trying to make, more vendors should focus on constantly shipping new dealer-requested features AND not view new features as an add-on package to sell.

 

[jon.berna]

more vendors should focus on constantly shipping new dealer-requested features AND not view new features as an add-on package to sell.

To do this effectively vendors have to build in public, which nearly all won't do. You have show your roadmap. The argument that your competition is going to pick a part your strategy is bogus. I am not talking about large partnerships or new products, just existing products. The other argument not to share a roadmap is because they don't have one or it's all $ add-ons, back to your main point.

A lot of the product development world is transitioning away from agile because it's not agile enough, people have been saying this for years as a joke but the big tech layoffs were primarily to the middle managers between development and leadership. When you destroy all the bureaucracy you can actually build very fast and get something between a prototype and finished product out in a matter of days now versus sprints. AI has helped to close the gap between below avg developers and good developers so smaller teams can really move now.
Bottom line: Just let the devs build the cool ideas they try them on users. If the users like it then scale it, stop planning for the sake of planning.

The core issue is companies confusing a feature versus a product because it costs so much to build everything. Every new innovative thing your application does shouldn't be individual branded products. Remember the mission solve problems and be useful.

 

[Carsten]

lol, I'm a agile certified scrum master and agile certified product owner.
I'm triggered!!! lol

I bailed from one of the Major Credit Bureaus and moved to a smaller enterprise dev shops. Said Credit Bureau faced lots of this middle layer "decision makers" and who mostly were justifying their position with busy work. This same company also bought great ideas and then "incorporated" them and thus sunset them after they didn't have anything left to give.

Agile isn't the issue but rather how companies and certifications have been built around it. lol, yeah! I have 2 certs!

As for the feature creation ...
Corporate is gonna corporate ... software or car dealer. Same issues. Same type of teams needing to work hand in hand with each other.