Used Car Process for Auto Group Advice Needed

[JeremySmith]

There are a few issues with taking photos of an unfinished car to upload with the "better" photos coming later.

1. Most websites will not automatically update the photos, so the "OK" ones are all the consumer sees.
2. You have 1 chance to make a good first impression. If a consumer sees the "OK" photos and does not like how the car looks, they don't visit that car again in a few day to see if it got better. They scratch it off the list
3. If a consumer is on the site and sees any car with a dirty photo it makes them wonder about the condition of any car at the dealership.

I think having a car online before it is actually able to be sold is a strange move. If someone comes to buy it and they can't because it is still in service, there is a better chance of them buying somewhere else that day because they are in the "buying mode". Are you better off having them see your car online on Tuesday, deciding to come see it on Tuesday, not being able to buy it and go somewhere else because they left the house to buy a car, or having them see it online on Friday, ready to go?

The issue to me is not getting them photographed faster, it is getting them ready to be sold faster. I am amazed by the number of cars I see in the system for weeks that are not inspected or clean. If they are not inspected in MD you can't sell them, photos or no photos....

Anytime you design and implement a new process you are going to discover opportunities and bottlenecks. It goes without saying that the process you end up with will not be the same as what you started with.

As we begun the implementation of the process I laid out above, we made sure to contact all of our third party inventory hosts to be sure that they had their system set up to refresh the photos whenever new photos were received. That solved our "OK" photo issue.

I agree with your first impression comment and would argue that having no picture or even having a stock photo is a far worse first impression than having 7 to 10 actual photos. I am not suggesting you should shoot the car dirty, but rather that a full detail is not necessary in order the get a minimum amount of actual photos posted quickly. I believe that in any process, exercising good judgment should always trump blindly following policy. That being said, (I can't believe that it needed to be said, but I guess it did) if a car looks disgusting on the inside you might not want to include interior pictures.

We have our final photos framed with a banner so that when the old photos are replaced it looks like a completely different vehicle which increases our chance of click through (VDP).

To your final statement I'll simply say that I'd rather have that customer come in on Tuesday, giving me the chance to control and capture the sale, than have the same customer, who is obviously in the buying stage if they showed up the first day you had a car listed, go to the next car they found and purchase it. In that scenario, I never even knew I had a chance.

The way I interpret your remark, is that you would prefer to not know you lost the sale. I think I'll go with being proactive and trust that I have solid people and processes to address the customer when he or she arrives. There are a million things I can think of worse than having to tell a customer that the vehicle they came in to see is not ready to sell.

I will say this, Kudos to whoever purchased that unit because it will obviously move quickly.