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What do you think of this?

Apr 28, 2009
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First Name
Jerry
I came across this get an instant price option on a dealer website and decided to check it out. Was not sure what I would get. Was surprised to see a price pop up. I wonder what percentage of people are putting in a real phone number and how successful are salespeople at picking up the phone and converting these opportunities to sales.

Anyone have any experience with this?

 
It's an interesting idea.
I was talking to someone at DD14 about an idea I like even better though. It's a system that does the negotiating for you - you set a threshold and then it will auto-respond to offers that are below that number. I have no idea how good their execution was, but I think it could all be done on the site, rather than emails back and forth. You enter an offer, it responds to let you know that unfortunately the offer did not meet the spec, etc.

I doubt it's realistically going to be mind boggling great, but I really liked the idea and where it was headed.
I think the idea is more avoiding $5 offers than anything, but I thought it was relevant and interesting, rather than just tossing the price out there.
 
My name is John Marazzi.I own Brandon Honda.We use instant pricer and have had tremendous success with it.The name of the game is to convert folks that get to your site.What does a customer want? The best price...So why not give them the opportunity to get it.
Last month we sold 47 customers that clicked on instant pricer.It's our single best ROI of all the things we do.
FYI we're also the top volume Honda dealer on Florida's west coast and we have the highest PVR of all the Honda dealers in the Tampa retro.
John
 
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It's an interesting idea.
I was talking to someone at DD14 about an idea I like even better though. It's a system that does the negotiating for you - you set a threshold and then it will auto-respond to offers that are below that number. I have no idea how good their execution was, but I think it could all be done on the site, rather than emails back and forth. You enter an offer, it responds to let you know that unfortunately the offer did not meet the spec, etc.

I doubt it's realistically going to be mind boggling great, but I really liked the idea and where it was headed.
I think the idea is more avoiding $5 offers than anything, but I thought it was relevant and interesting, rather than just tossing the price out there.

I'll be rolling out something VERY close to this within the next week for one of our locations. When it's up and running, I'll post a link. Programmatically speaking it's really easy to do.
 
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I'll be rolling out something VERY close to this within the next week for one of our locations. When it's up and running, I'll post a link. Programmatically speaking it's really easy to do.

Chad,
From a programming perspective, are you pulling a threshold from the dealership or are you using a formula to calculate it for each vehicle? The setup I'm working on now requires that the dealer feed contains their cost field as well and that they're comfortable with a % or $ over cost per vehicle. It has price breaks and such (ie: $1000-$5000 minimum 10%, $5000-$10,000 could be minimum 5%), but I'm curious if you're doing it with the cost in mind or just reverse engineering the list price?
 
Chad,
From a programming perspective, are you pulling a threshold from the dealership or are you using a formula to calculate it for each vehicle? The setup I'm working on now requires that the dealer feed contains their cost field as well and that they're comfortable with a % or $ over cost per vehicle. It has price breaks and such (ie: $1000-$5000 minimum 10%, $5000-$10,000 could be minimum 5%), but I'm curious if you're doing it with the cost in mind or just reverse engineering the list price?

I'll try and explain it as best as possible. I'm rolling this out on 2 of our negotiating dealers and both want something a little different - one a bit more complicated than the other.

Dealer A wants a flat percentage under internet price as accepted. For example, if with a $10 - 15k internet price and an offer within 97% deal is accepted, else it is not (exacts % is still up in air). If a $15k - 20k internet price and offer within 95% is accepted, else it is not.

Dealer B wants wants dollar amount based on age of vehicle. We're lucky we get a lot age field with our field so this is pretty easy. Any vehicle < 15 days old and offer is within $500 of internet price = accepted. If vehicle age > 15 and < 30 and offer is within $750 = accepted.
 
I like that. It makes sense. We handle "lot age" within our inventory directly, assuming that the check-in time on the website is close enough to the time the vehicle was added. We also store all the historical prices, updated_at time stamps, etc.

I'm trying to find the best way to leverage this advantage. The next step after that is actually converting the "Accepted" into a purchase. I am curious to see how both of those dealers fare. I know that for us the other really important part is going to be the bartering "process" - we want to go back and forth to give the illusion of real bargaining. From what I've heard from a few people with similar systems, the more the customers feels they "negotiated" the more commited they are to the purchase itself.

Time will tell if it works. Thanks for the information though - that's great.
 
Maybe I'm getting to "Customer Experiencey..." but seems like from a consumer end it could be fun once but would get kinda innoying not knowing the best price on each car.

Anyone know if this is Acura compliant? Seems kinda like the same idea of get E-Price button on the OEM website.

Chad thats pretty cool, so the customer can make an offer with an instant acceptence? If you dont mind, is it live, if so do consumers send info more then once on a vehicle to try and find out the best accepted price?