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Websites made by a company that doesn't specialize in dealerships?

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#31
So, it is completely possible to utilize a vendor outside your industry. They will have to put in the time to research your industry, analyze the research and create a website that better handles the objections of an internet shopper. The initial cost doesn't come cheap, and there will always be continued improvements to be made.

So, if you have 10+ stores in your dealer group, and can afford to have a developer on staff, then having a 3rd party build your site might be worth it. One site versus 10+ sites would eventually break even.
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Great point. This is the exception to my previous comment. There's no hand-off since the person who built it is on your payroll :D
 
#33
cmjerry4531 said:
So, it is completely possible to utilize a vendor outside your industry. They will have to put in the time to research your industry, analyze the research and create a website that better handles the objections of an internet shopper. The initial cost doesn't come cheap, and there will always be continued improvements to be made.
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I never once said you not to DIY or hire someone outside the industry, There's all kinds of DIY winners out here
--http://www.carsense.com/
--http://www.auctiondirectusa.com/
--http://www.cityauto.com/
--http://www.westherr.com/


My thoughts from 2011*:

"One of the greatest errors in considering building a DIY dealer website is under-estimating the task.

If I hand you a guitar and ask you to play me a song in 3 months, can you see the difficult road ahead?... Yes. Now, if I hand you a guitar and ask you to play me a song in 3 months AND MAKE MONEY WITH IT... Can you see how much harder the task becomes?

Making a web site can be easy. OUT PERFORMING the site your replacing ain't easy.

Think about it."

* http://forum.dealerrefresh.com/f43/...ler-website-considering-2258-2.html#post19612
 
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#34
For those DR readers that are entertaining building a site on your own, or hiring an non-auto developer, look at this VDP review below.

Could you do this yourself? Can whom ever your hiring do it... from day 1? How many years will you invest to get your rent-a-geek to be this accomplished? How many months of lost opportunities are you look at? Selling cars is a team sport. Compare the depth of Craig's insights vs a geek that prefers to ride a bike to work. You've got years of mentoring ahead of you. IT'S AUTOMOTIVE TALENT AND EXPERIENCE LIKE CRAIG BRINGS THAT SELLS MORE CARS.

One last thought.
Spencer's post missed the business side of this. The website is a rather small fraction of the total cost of the stores operation, yet its VERY CRITICAL to the stores success. So, the highest ROI is to get the highest performing website (more sales).

In the end, to win the war, the entire project will be resting on the shoulders of the smartest guy in the room.

Uncle Joe Rule #44: "Hire Smart or Work Hard"


craigh said:
My credentials probably don't meet your criteria.
I've only been programming for 12 years, doing automotive websites for 8 years, working in automotive marketing for 5 years and managing a team of developers for 2 years. I'm certainly not as qualified as many people are.
The only thing I have to back myself up is analytics from my clients that blew my expectations out of the water.
I moved them from their old platform (Trader.ca) to our platform and studied 6 sites with the utmost scrutiny to determine what does and doesn't work, etc. We saw organic growth from our lowest of 18% (zero advertising spend, hardly any traditional marketing) to our highest which was 104% YOY.

As far as the VDP goes, I'm a pessimist and I'll dwell on the poorer aspects of it.
It would appear, after writing the list below, that this dealership should not be happy with their vendor, BUT I imagine the oweness is on them because they have CMS access and should have fixed many of these things.

1. Blackbook link leaves the page. Personally, I believe this should be in a modal because the form is tiny. You can still track the pageview, the click and get the form result without taking the user off the inventory page.

2. Credit score link leaves the page but doesn't track the vehicle that linked it explicitly. It may track behind the scenes, but since there are no GET variables being passed to the iFrame it means that the financing form has no idea what car you were looking at.

3. Vehicle Details are wrong - because these came from a VIN decoder I suppose. It says 22" Chrome rims under the one tab. The sticker on the windshield says 2012 but the vehicle is listed as a 2013.

4. Photos should not be hidden. In my opinion, if you're going to do great photos and have many of them, you should spend the real estate showing them all or at least give an option to "show all". I'm looking for a photo of just the cargo bay to see if it has a cargo liner and I have to scroll and scroll and scroll. At the very least, when you get to the end of the scroll allow it to scroll back to the beginning so I'm not clicking back 6 more times to see the first photo.

5. Photos cannot be enlarged further. Again, such high quality photos and I can only see what appears to be a 600px by 600px photo? This is a mistake, especially when it comes to detail photos. Offer a javascript magnifying glass or a lightbox enlargement of the photo.

6. The 360 viewer uses QuickTime. QuickTime is documented at being installed on just 50-60% of internet enabled computers. Not only is it not installed, but there's no reason for anyone to install it because it's ancient software. Quicktime Usage Statistics
I happen to have it installed on my Apple computer and I tried the Interior 360 - it was miserably choppy and immediately unusable. I tried the external one and could not get a rear view of the vehicle and I'm about as tech savvy as they get. Also doesn't help that this is stock photos and does not match the actual vehicle in question - just seems to misrepresent the vehicle for sale. I would ditch this feature entirely.

7. Today's Most Popular Picks - 0 Results Found
I don't even know what this tool does because there's nothing there. Sounded exciting if it was working.

8. Clicking the map on this VDP takes me to a map of all locations instead of a map of this location. Even if I click the specific address it takes me to a generic map where I have to click the back button to determine which address I wanted so I know which of the 3 to choose from.

9. When I load the VDP, it does this strange slow scroll thing, but for some reason the Sun Customer Appreciation Days doesn't move, it just slowly slides into it's place. Seems like some position absolute and javascript scrolling conflict.

10. The Share on Twitter link message just says "Used Inventory" and then dumps a link out. Should be smarter.

11. The print page button is a small disaster. Has a Chat Now button in the middle of the page and all the features are just sort of puked all over the bottom of the page. Clearly just a cop-out on a print function rather than having a usable print-out for customers. Contains ads and one vehicle photo, but vehicle details are Page 1 and price is Page 3.

12. When submitting a lead, it goes to a success page. This success page doesn't have multiple-submission protection and it allows me to re-post the same data over and over again. However, I like how it saved my information to my session for future forms.

13. I click "Calculate Another Payment" and both the Financing and Trade-In links go to entirely different places than the other finance and trade-in links I saw and clicked. One of them is actually broken and says the tool is no longer available.

14. The disclaimer on the MPG estimator says "* Rates and terms subject to change based on year of vehicle and credit history. All payment estimates exclude sales tax." How is this relevant to MPG?

15. I missed a field on the form submission, but it scrolls too far when it shows the error and scrolls past the field I missed so I can't see what I actually missed. (sidebar form)

16. The call to action form is not only "below the fold" (yes, old terminolgy), but I have to scroll past the photos to find it. I can view all of the most important pieces of information about this vehicle without even once viewing the form to fill out for a lead. Customers will not know the form exists if they see price, trim, year and photos above the fold and choose not to scroll.

17. No related vehicles. One of the most common requests I get from clients AND customers is related vehicles. If they searched and found a vehicle they want to compare them on the page they're on - they shouldn't have to go back or go find other vehicles just to do a comparison if they're already on this page looking at one they like. Could be dealer's choice or the "My Cars" thing, but I prefer to see related vehicles when the client allows.

18. I did some looking around and the text below the vehicle in the breadcrumbs is a bit broken. It has the type of car between the model and the trim and any vehicle without a valid trim says $item.trim instead of the trim.

The rest is good. Assume if I didn't pick on it that I agree with it or simply didn't have time to look at it all.
The above are negatives and needs improvements combined together. There are probably some things missing besides Related Vehicles, but I like it for what it is. Call to Action should be higher, more prominent.

I'll send my bill in the mail once I see these changes made ;)
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#37
ddavis said:
Joe, that is a lot of great information. My question is, of anyone in a Director's role at a dealership, who has time for this?
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I wouldn't recommend anyone go down this road if they don't have someone who has the expertise or sufficient knowledge on staff with the time to see it through. The original RFP is critical in it's detail, but once development starts there is still some monitoring that needs to be completed. Off the top of my head, I would ensure that the Internet Leads Manager is in on the discussions, but unless your website and all third parties are under-performing than he/she likely doesn't have time for this either.

95% of the time a dealership will be better off with an Automotive specific vendor.
I just want to be clear that the other 5% of the time does exist and can work if managed correctly from the dealership side.
 
#38
Craig, all dealership websites are templates, even the best. It takes effort to make them perform. Most stores are not willing to put in the effort or don't have a clue. Can you imagine what a monumental leap this is to a custom website?
 
#39
ddavis said:
Craig, all dealership websites are templates, even the best. It takes effort to make them perform. Most stores are not willing to put in the effort or don't have a clue. Can you imagine what a monumental leap this is to a custom website?
Click to expand...

Huh? All dealership websites are templates?
And yes, I understand the leap very well. I worked at a dealership as a young kid and took on the challenge of bringing their website in-house myself. It's the only reason I ended up where I am now.
 
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