Just wanted to let you all know that my salesperson gene king does a wonderful jof before the sale and after. Always thinking of us. Thanks gene for all your help
Conrad slorp

Conrad slorp

Dealership ratings are SO not like product ratings. Whereas many people will review products whether they like them or not, 95% of unprompted dealership reviews (maybe higher) are of the negative variety. Almost nobody goes out of their way to rave about a great car buying experience, but many are willing to vent about a bad experience to anyone who will listen. It's generally only those customers who are encouraged to post positive reviews that will do so (and most of those who are encouraged to do so, will not).

Thank you, cars.com, for further dilluting the review pool and for giving us yet another site on which to police fake negative reviews. Unscrupulous competitors will do this and it's VERY hard to police, especially if all cars.com requires in order to post a damaging anonymous review is a valid email address (which can be created in about 2 minutes).

Dealers can opt out of the ATC reviews if they don't want them posted. This way some dealers who are really into concerned about their reputation can have them displayed. Other dealers who don't care about their online reputation can turn them off.

It should be "When Shoppers Speak (Nicely) You Win". What about the negative reviews? Cars.com and AutoTrader are jumping in way too early on this band wagon. And to whose benefit? Surely not the dealer, who is paying to advertise their vehicles on what now could contain detrimental content for their business.

Good luck Cars and Trader. I'd hate to be the one taking the phone calls from your dealers when the negative reviews start piling up.

Time will only tell. My bet is that Cars.com is heading for disaster with this one. If you have honest reviews, you must publish all of the negative ones as well as the good ones. How fast will a dealer threaten to cancel Cars.com if a negative review is posted? How fast will consumers see right through it if every review they see is a good one? This appears to be a no win situation for Cars.com.

Wouldn't you want to keep your customers on a site that offers the Dealer Review research right there? Content that is monitored by the site owner by giving the dealers the heads up before it is posted to the site? Or would you rather the consumer Google your dealership name only to find one of the 140 possible review sites where consumers write "unmonitored" reviews?

By the way, for ATC to post these external reviews seems to give too much validation to these random external sites. They should do what Cars.com is doing instead.

So Cars.com reviews will not be genuine for the consumer?

Jeff, thanks for starting this thread. Lots of comments and debatewill surely follow. Is Cars.com attempting to bite the hand that feeds them? They will say no... but what will the dealers say?

I would be interested to know how far will Cars.com go to protect the integrity of the reviews. It is extremely easy to create positive reviews for yourself (and negative ones for your competitors) - and without an method for checking the validity of the reviews, Cars.com might find itself play "cop" on a full time basis. If a review can simply be posted based on a phone call or email (or lack of either) it looks like it would be very easy for those inclined to do so, to manipulate the system.

Robert,

ATC is not increasing rates. You are obviously not paying attention and if you do work for ATC, it's time you find another job.

Dangerous as most 3rd party reviews out there are negative reviews. Where Cars.com will be consulting the dealer through this process and allowing dealers to have the last say in the review.

This is not a main focal point for ATC we are discussing our new 2011 dealer solutions not dealer reviews. This is a great way to truly help our Dealer Partners and show that the company Cars.com truly cares about things like CSI and Co Op dollars all of that impact our dealer partners. Here at ATC we are discussing our new solutions and the pricing of it. I guess to cover our purchases of VAuto, KBB and HomeNet. I hate when I have to increase rates!!!!!!!

Premium listings, promoted listings, either way, nothing in the auto business is free. The end of the day we still do all the work while the vendor gets paid.

It will probably be bundled with the Premium Listings that Cars.com is getting ready to unleash!

There will be no charge for Dealer Reviews on Cars.com.

On the surface, it seems that the ability to "Opt In" to the dealer review service is the best of both worlds. This way, only the dealerships that want the reviews, get them.

My biggest concern would be that until you have at least 25+ reviews the "rating system" will be greatly affected by one negative review. Of course it is easy to say that if you are providing excellent customer service and vehicles there should be no worry, but everyone knows it is much easier for a person to spend a few minutes ranting online in a review than to write a glowing review.

This is just another way for another vendor to squeeze every last penny out of the auto dealers. When does it stop? Will all you vendors be happy when we are out of business? Every new tool, vendor, review site, is another way to charge us money.

I can only imagine that Cars.com will charge some round number of about $499 per rooftop to be a "sponsored review dealer". This will line right up with their $275 for video, $425 for specials, and $500 for power positions.

When a company like Cars.com is owned and operated by a failing industry such as newspapers, you get this effect.

Not sure if it's a good idea for an advertiser such as Cars.com to be basically hosting reviews of its very own clients...a little up in the air on this one. The transparency continues to broaden, which I'm all for, but I'll think on this one for a bit.

Here is what Chip Perry the CEO of Autotrader has to say about their role in dealer ratings "We (autotrader) will help them (dealers) merchandise on AutoTrader the fact that they have a great reputation online." He goes on to say that Autotrader dealers will have the choice to opt in if they want the feature. - YouTube to watch it for yourself.....

Howard – thanks for the question (and for being a Cars.com partner).
We’re trying to be careful about making sure this is a feature dedicated to reputation management, and not one about arbitration and mediation. We also knew that making this process easy for ALL dealers is vitally important. We’ve built our initial process to consist of a consumer review (validated and moderated) and a dealer response (also moderated). The goal here is that we don’t want to encourage or require a back-and-forth between our dealers and our reviewers, but we still want to make sure dealers ALWAYS have the last word in the exchange. What we hope (and expect) to find, is that a positive response to a negative review will actually lead to a far better experience for our partners – our research shows that it’s often how a negative review is handled publically that has the biggest positive impact.

Feedback like this is exactly why we wanted to make our announcement now, two months before ANY dealership can choose early enrollment. We'll be in beta for at least the first half of the year, to give everyone (Cars.com included) a chance to really understand the impact of this new feature.
Nick

I love it! This is what the internet is about... transparency for all. Now you get to see how your competition is faring, as well, at least on AutoTrader.com and Cars.com. The shopper rules online, and they trust reviews from their peers far more than they trust a sales person. Managing brand/ dealer reputation should be a daily activity, and monitoring scattered social media conversations can be daunting, but one bad review sitting out there for three months before you discover it will prove how essential it really is to do. There are some very powerful tools out there to do it for you and help you review and respond (SocialDealer, GOSO, etc.)--even an aggregation tool like Google Alerts is better than nothing; but clearly, the time is upon us all to increase awareness of what shoppers are saying about us (and our competition)... and get in on the conversation.

Disclaimer: I work for HomeNet, and we are partners with SocialDealer... but that doesn't change the truth of my words.

Consumers will not be able to post reviews on ATC. ATC will link to third party reviews.

I am very disappionted that Cars.com & as I was told soon Autotrader.com is getting into the REVIEW buisness!! Don't they work for us the "Auto Dealer"! I pay cars.com over $6,000 a month for both dealerships to advertise My vehicles.......I am a top rated (Best of the Best) dealership so I am not as much worried about getting bad reviews but someone that works for me / advertises for me is going to show a non (5 star) review flatterying review is they day I take back my $6,000 dollars!

Nick. As a paying member of the cars.com club Id like to know how your company plans to arbitrate negative reviews? Have you considered a period of time to not display negative reviews like dealerrater so the dealer can respond? As pointed out by others, this is great for some and detrimental for others to the point of dropping use of cars.com.