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I am BEYOND frustrated with Dealer.com

As someone who who has worked in support for a company that handles data distribution I have worked with DDC support many times.

One thing to remember is the support is only as good as the support person you are working with and how much they care about what they are doing.

There are always some who are just there for the paycheck and some who will go the extra mile and even push the limits of their company guidelines on your behalf because they want to help.

The end result stacks up to the same thing. If the company you are working with has such strict guidelines that they do not allow for a good employee who is passionate about giving good customer service to go the extra mile on your behalf then it may be time to look elsewhere.

Simply put. It comes down to knowing your customer as someone other than a dealer ID #. Which comes back to statements that have been made on this forum many times. Bigger and better known doesn't always mean better.
 
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I'd like to bump this thread with my own frustration. We thought it would be nice to setup our pricing in some festive colors for the holidays. Simple task of changing some color codes, right? Wrong. I requested this from our rep "Frank" about a week and a half ago! I've emailed numerous times, talked on the phone and let him know that I am very close to taking our sites in-house and getting rid of them - which still has not generated any sense of urgency.

I got curious earlier and decided to dig into what exactly needed to be changed and this is it folks: a Style Sheet consisting of 7 lines of code, that they could have COPY & PASTED from the example site I gave them.

You would think I was having custom buttons and other graphic work performed with the almost 2 weeks this has taken and the way that they allude to "working on the colors" like it is some kind of project - but NO! Just a few lines of code. I am thoroughly insulted.

This is all they needed to do:


http://static.dealer.com/sites/r/__dealerprofile__/stylesheets/newvdp.css?0


/* DNAXXXXX ddctimb */
.inv-t3 #overview .price dt,
.inv-t3 #overview .price dd {color:#006600;}
.inv-t3 #overview .price dt.secondaryPrice,
.inv-t3 #overview .price dd.secondaryPrice {color:#006699;}
.inv-t3 #overview .price dt.secondaryPrice.discountAmount,
.inv-t3 #overview .price dd.secondaryPrice.discountAmount {color:#ff0000;}




*The 006600 is telling the main price to be blue, the 006699 is telling the second one to be green and ff0000 is telling the third one to be red*


Want something done, do it yourself, eh? :mad:
 
I got curious earlier and decided to dig into what exactly needed to be changed and this is it folks: a Style Sheet consisting of 7 lines of code, that they could have COPY & PASTED from the example site I gave them.

You would think I was having custom buttons and other graphic work performed with the almost 2 weeks this has taken and the way that they allude to "working on the colors" like it is some kind of project - but NO! Just a few lines of code. I am thoroughly insulted.

Want something done, do it yourself, eh? :mad:

I just wish we had some way to include ONE javascript file and ONE CSS file in the <HEAD> of our pages. Two files that we could edit ourselves to make the site work as we desire (and know is easily possible).
 
I'm certainly no expert -- haven't really worked direct with site providers or on OEM specific programs in a few years (and I'm not going to start!). But a quick look at Jeff D'Ambrosio's site shows multiple OEM's including Chrysler. I do know that all OEM programs have certain restrictions in-place, including restrictions on colors.

Again, I have NO IDEA if this is the situation, but I would suspect that color changes to an OEM platform would require more research than simply changing a few lines of code.

There's a reason that OEM's mandate site providers and templates -- the same reason that they mandate certain signs and fascias and colors in the showroom and on the building: they want all their dealers to have a certain look and feel -- they want consistency.

And I think we can all agree that once an OEM is involved, even the simplest little things can become plicomcated :).
 
I'm certainly no expert -- haven't really worked direct with site providers or on OEM specific programs in a few years (and I'm not going to start!). But a quick look at Jeff D'Ambrosio's site shows multiple OEM's including Chrysler. I do know that all OEM programs have certain restrictions in-place, including restrictions on colors.

Again, I have NO IDEA if this is the situation, but I would suspect that color changes to an OEM platform would require more research than simply changing a few lines of code.

There's a reason that OEM's mandate site providers and templates -- the same reason that they mandate certain signs and fascias and colors in the showroom and on the building: they want all their dealers to have a certain look and feel -- they want consistency.

And I think we can all agree that once an OEM is involved, even the simplest little things can become plicomcated :).

I second JQuinn;

MRMaseati you would be surprised what a foreign line of code can do to a system. You would be even more surpised how these giant systems that they create to build site after site can get so rigid that changing things is as hard as swaping the engines between 2 different model production vehicles. Furthermore... not everyone at DDC can be a "programer" or a coder, even though it is easy for you most of the times they have 1 good guy per department and then a bunch of operators that know how to work within the cinfinements of the system's architecture.
 
My relationship with Dealer.com has been great. I was led to them because of how much I liked the Checkered Flag websites and I have tried to mirror (in some sense) what they do. My rep (Travis) has always been great with me and most of my changes are handled rather quickly. Simple changes I do myself but the other stuff that is more detailed is handled by their staff quickly. I would suggest them to anyone that's looking to change. I think the problem with forums is just like customer reviews. You only hear about something when there's an issue. For every one person that hates DDC, 1,000 people really like them. You just never hear from them!
 
Welp, it's fixed now so my post must have garnered some attention from someone - since I never got a response from my rep (so I doubt it was him.) Whoever took care of it - thank you very much!

And I understand your point about the compliance for sure but they didn't communicate anything to me in relation to that and definitely didn't elude to there being any question at all of us being able to do this, since after all we got the inspiration from another dealer selling the same brand and also using DDC - so they'd have already researched it for them and had the answer. I was basically told that they were backed up with requests and that is why it was taking so long.

In any case, I was on the other end of this when I worked at HomeNet and this is the kind of change that we'd make WHILE you were on the phone with us - never mind a ticket, let alone one that takes almost 2 weeks to complete. I've done this for hundreds of dealers myself so that's how I kind of knew what it involved and why it ticked me off as much as it did.

Oh well - all is well, I'm just glad we actually got it up before Xmas (albeit barely.) :)