Is There Actually a Market for Franchise-Level Websites at $399/mo for Independents?

[DjSec]

Not shutting the door on feedback but you have made multiple false statements and I am simply not looking to get into a back and forth about it. I was simply looking for dealer feed back on the question.

You said I made “multiple false statements,” so I’m asking you to point out specifically which ones were false.
To make this easy, here is exactly what I stated:

1. You asked whether a dealer would pay triple for a “better” website, yet your website isn't better.
2. I asked what makes you different you never answered.
3. Your website does not meet ADA accessibility requirements, which puts dealerships at legal risk.
4. Your websites do not follow Google’s core guidelines and will not rank as well as they could.
5. A professional checks for coding and structural errors, your sites contain many.
6. I asked again what makes you different, and again there was no answer.

If any of these points are factually incorrect, please identify them so we can address them one by one.

I do not understand:

Why do so many web developers knowingly deliver websites that fail basic compliance, accessibility, SEO, and technical standards?

In the end it hurts your customer:

• Dealers end up at an unfair disadvantage online.
• They are forced to depend on expensive third-party vendors to compensate for issues that should have been prevented.
• Their own website never reaches its potential.

This ultimately harms the dealer, not the developer.

Your destroying your own customer base, it make dealers believe a website is worth nothing more than $99 because you build paper cutouts of what a website should be.

And your upset at me for pointing it out?

You and every company out there has built a system that is nothing more than a race to the bottom for both the developers and dealerships and I am the bad guy for pointing out something that is destroying everyone.

 

[Mark A Hoffman]

Years ago, I was an owner in AutoRevo and we built websites for indies. I've been out of that space for well over a decade, so I don't have a horse in this race but I can speak from experience on a few things:

1. It's already been mentioned but there are a lot of indies that are BHPH and/or selling salvage - They just don't really care about much of the things that other dealers care about. They're doing just fine with the $99 website which provides a lot of value for what they need.

2. A lot of indies don't do any kind of digital advertising and they expect their website to overcome that completely. It probably won't; regardless of what your page speed scores or SEO is doing, unless you have a very niche market. If you're selling the same kinds of cars that franchise dealers are paying to advertise online, you're going to lose out to them a lot. And my experience was a lot of indies expected their website to make them as relevant as the franchise dealer spending thousands of month in marketing. But it just won't and many of them don't see that.

3. It's a tough, crowded, competitive market that is extraordinarily price-sensitive with deeply entrenched players dominating the market. There's not a lot of room for expensive innovation because many indies dealers just don't care about it, or won't pay for it.

Best of luck.

 

[SavvyNick]

Years ago, I was an owner in AutoRevo and we built websites for indies. I've been out of that space for well over a decade, so I don't have a horse in this race but I can speak from experience on a few things:

1. It's already been mentioned but there are a lot of indies that are BHPH and/or selling salvage - They just don't really care about much of the things that other dealers care about. They're doing just fine with the $99 website which provides a lot of value for what they need.

2. A lot of indies don't do any kind of digital advertising and they expect their website to overcome that completely. It probably won't; regardless of what your page speed scores or SEO is doing, unless you have a very niche market. If you're selling the same kinds of cars that franchise dealers are paying to advertise online, you're going to lose out to them a lot. And my experience was a lot of indies expected their website to make them as relevant as the franchise dealer spending thousands of month in marketing. But it just won't and many of them don't see that.

3. It's a tough, crowded, competitive market that is extraordinarily price-sensitive with deeply entrenched players dominating the market. There's not a lot of room for expensive innovation because many indies dealers just don't care about it, or won't pay for it.

Best of luck.

Thanks Mark. This is good insight.

 

[DjSec]

1. It's already been mentioned but there are a lot of indies that are BHPH and/or selling salvage - They just don't really care about much of the things that other dealers care about. They're doing just fine with the $99 website which provides a lot of value for what they need.

Absolutely true. Some BHPH and salvage dealers don’t need more than a placeholder.
But the problem is:

Vendors sell those $99 sites as if they will rank, convert, and protect the dealer legally when they won’t.

If a dealership knowingly chooses a placeholder site, that’s fine.
But most don’t know. They aren’t told:

• the site will never rank
• it’s not ADA compliant (lawsuit risk)
• the Core Web Vitals fail
• coding errors hurt crawlability
• they’re paying for something that can’t produce ROI

It would be like selling someone a car that isn’t street legal and pretending everything is fine. Dealers deserve honesty.

2. A lot of indies don't do any kind of digital advertising and they expect their website to overcome that completely. It probably won't; regardless of what your page speed scores or SEO is doing, unless you have a very niche market. If you're selling the same kinds of cars that franchise dealers are paying to advertise online, you're going to lose out to them a lot. And my experience was a lot of indies expected their website to make them as relevant as the franchise dealer spending thousands of month in marketing. But it just won't and many of them don't see that.

True, a website alone won’t beat a franchise group spending $10k–$50k/month in ads.

But indies don’t need to outspend them, they only need a site that can convert the traffic they’re already getting.

With the right structure:

• organic “buyer intent” SEO can pull in high-quality leads
• social traffic will convert if the site is built properly
• clean code, compliance, and speed don’t magically rank a site,
  but they remove friction so content can actually perform

Franchise groups succeed because their foundation is strong.
Indies fail because theirs is weak not because it’s impossible.

3. It's a tough, crowded, competitive market that is extraordinarily price-sensitive with deeply entrenched players dominating the market. There's not a lot of room for expensive innovation because many indies dealers just don't care about it, or won't pay for it.

This is true only when the value is invisible or hypothetical.

But consider the math most dealers already use:

1. CarGurus: $1,200–$2,500/mo
2. AutoTrader: $1,500–$3,000/mo
3. Cars.com: $800–$2,000/mo

Dealers justify those expenses by saying:
“If I sell 5–10 cars from this platform, the ROI makes sense.”

Using that exact same math:
If a website could reliably produce 5–10 car sales per month…
Wouldn’t the same ROI logic apply?

Dealers don’t object to price, they object to paying for something that produces nothing.

If a website actually:

• ranks
• converts
• loads fast
• doesn’t expose them to ADA lawsuits
• and replaces a portion of their third-party spend

Dealers will pay for it.
They just haven’t been offered that option before.

So lets say Dealers aim to spend roughly $200 to $400 in advertising for every car they sell. If the website never sells a car it is worth the lest amount they can pay, however if it is doing what it is supposed to and selling 5, 10, 50, 100 cars per month ... all of a sudden it is worth a lot more.

 

[Mark A Hoffman]

They just haven’t been offered that option before.

Websites are a commodity business now. But it's still expensive to build all the necessary infrastructure and functionality. If nobody is doing what you say, then it's almost certainly because they have found it's not profitable or a good use of resources to do so. It's not because no one has considered it.

 

[DjSec]

Websites are a commodity business now. But it's still expensive to build all the necessary infrastructure and functionality. If nobody is doing what you say, then it's almost certainly because they have found it's not profitable or a good use of resources to do so. It's not because no one has considered it.

“If nobody is doing it, it must not be profitable” doesn’t line up with what the data!

If that were true, we would see studies proving that slower, template-driven, non-ADA-compliant websites generate more profit for dealers.

But instead, every major study shows the opposite:

• Google: Sites that take 3 seconds lose 53% of their traffic. This directly impacts Crawl Budget, Crawl Rate, Depth, and Timeout.
• Amazon: +1% sales for every 100ms improvement.
• Mobify: +1.11% conversions every 100ms.
• Walmart: +2% conversions for each 1-second improvement.
• Cook: +7% conversions per 850ms improvement.

None of these companies concluded “performance doesn’t matter” or “it’s not profitable to build a fast website.” They reached the opposite conclusion.

So the issue isn’t profitability ... it’s capability!

If not where are the studies?
Where are the examples?
Where are the sites that hit these benchmarks?
Where are the ADA-compliant dealership sites that avoid lawsuits?

They don’t exist because most vendors:

• rely on legacy templates
• don’t control their own infrastructure
• don’t specialize in performance engineering
• don’t know how to reach those standards
• and don’t have a financial incentive to improve because it does not affect their bottom line

That’s very different from:
“They could do it, they just choose not to.”
They don't do it because they can't do it!

Not being ADA compliant isn’t a small issue, it’s one of the biggest legal threats dealers face online.
ADA accessibility lawsuits routinely cost $10,000 to $50,000 per incident, and some reach into the six- and seven-figure range once legal fees and settlements are included.

If major website providers in the auto industry truly believed this wasn’t worth addressing, we would see:

• Accessible demo sites proving they can do it
• Lighthouse 100/100 examples
• WCAG-certified templates
• Public case studies showing the ROI of doing accessibility right

But we don’t because they can’t.
Not at scale, not with their current architecture, and not with the bloated legacy systems they’re locked into.

So the idea that these companies “chose not to” build fast, accessible, ADA-compliant websites despite the legal risks to their own customers doesn’t match reality.

It’s far more likely that they simply don’t have the technical ability or flexibility to execute it.

Unless you mean it is not profitable for the website design company, however the data shows it would be profitable for their customers!

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