Thinking of dropping Dealer.com

[MullerToyota]

I just spoke to my owner about possibly dropping Dealer.com when our contract runs up (in 1 1/2 years) and paying a company to design a new site that we can host on our own servers.

I am no longer impressed with a lot of what they are selling when I could do it for free.

Any thoughts?

If I do this, how long should I give a company to design a new site and what do you think is a reasonable cost to pay for someone to design a site?

 

[Matt DoCampo]

Sounds like a massive undertaking when a lot of the work can be accomplished with a more scalable yet still off-the-shelf dealership website. Have you considered other vendors?

 

[MullerToyota]

Sounds like a massive undertaking when a lot of the work can be accomplished with a more scalable yet still off-the-shelf dealership website. Have you considered other vendors?

I'm not actually sure who else will allow me to be as flexible as I want to be.

For example, I am more than capable of setting up a subdirectoy and installing a wordpress blog. Dealer.com charges me $299 to set up their crappy blog that can't do nearly what I want it to do.

Are there any vendors that will give me total access to my site and provide me something with quality? I can't think of one off the top of my head.

I just don't understand why I pay dealer.com close to $3k a month to expect, for the most part, pretty crappy results and little ability for me to customize or change anything.

I mean, I still need to make all the changes to our website as it is. I understand it would be a massive undertaking, but for a few months worth of work, I would have something that I have complete control over. I really think it would be worth it for me to do that.

My only real concern is to get our feeds to work correctly - but I am sure that I can find someone to help me with that.

 

[Billfred]

When I started here three years ago, we had an eBizAutos gallery and a mucho-old-school, email-the-webmaster-to-make-an-update website. (In the tradition of Cadillac designers with the Cimmaron, I have a screenshot of it printed out in my office with "LEST WE FORGET" written on the bottom.)

We then went to a locally-developed site with eBiz iframed in and a CMS to allow us to do updates locally. Took us a couple of months to get it live, and it was good for about two years. Finally, with a little encouragement from Brian Pasch on the SEO side and a little encouragement from elsewhere to get a mobile site running, we bit the bullet and went with a full-fat eBizAutos site that has been kicking gratuitous amounts of butt since last October or so.

Now, in theory one could export from an eBiz gallery to a custom display on a homebrew web site--at one point, I even had their export specs that showed what is possible. (Only limitation I saw: It only exports one price.) While I see the upside to getting the site The Exact Bleepin' Way You Want It, I wouldn't want to try it myself unless I had a web developer on call...and I don't. (Wordpress sites, though

Joe Pistell does this with a Homenet feed on his homebrew site--hopefully he'll chime in on your vision with the pros and cons.

 

[MullerToyota]

Thanks Bill. I am looking forward to, hopefully, hearing from Joe. I did look at the eBizAutos site as I was searching for other auto site vendors and their designs look awesome.

I have plenty of time to try and think this through but I am adamant on going to something that doesn't nickel and dime me every time I want to do something that I know how to do for free.

 

[Bruce Novicky]

I would say try to make the most out of what you have now in the meantime, it might wind up working for you. At the very least you will learn some things. For example, the chat button on your homepage has a white background instead of clear. If you are going to use a chat button with rounded edges you have to make sure it is a PNG or GIF and clear.

I am not picking on you at all, just wanted to point out something that is not dealer.com's fault that would be an issue no matter what the platform. Switching website vendors will not necessarily fix issues like this.

 

[mkeesee]

I happen to like the control and ease of the dealer.com site. It is sometimes frustrating making these changes myself, but now that my team and I are more educated with their control center. If anything fails its "on me". I say stick it out and hang in there. To change a website is extensive and overwhelming at times. Trust me, I just left the Cobalt group for all of my stores.

 

[MullerToyota]

I would say try to make the most out of what you have now in the meantime, it might wind up working for you. At the very least you will learn some things. For example, the chat button on your homepage has a white background instead of clear. If you are going to use a chat button with rounded edges you have to make sure it is a PNG or GIF and clear.

I am not picking on you at all, just wanted to point out something that is not dealer.com's fault that would be an issue no matter what the platform. Switching website vendors will not necessarily fix issues like this.

No, that is exactly dealer.com's problem. I told them specifically that the white background wouldn't work. If they can change it, to please do it or to LET ME KNOW AND I WILL DO IT. But, like always, if I'm not buying anything they don't want to be helpful.

Also, for the record, I'm not talking about switching vendors. I'm talking about having someone design a site for me on some platform like Joomla, Drupal or Wordpress and then I can handle everything from there.

Also, like I said, I have a year and half before my contract with dealer.com is up - so I have plenty of time. But, I don't see dealer.com in our company's future.

 

[MullerToyota]

I happen to like the control and ease of the dealer.com site. It is sometimes frustrating making these changes myself, but now that my team and I are more educated with their control center. If anything fails its "on me". I say stick it out and hang in there. To change a website is extensive and overwhelming at times. Trust me, I just left the Cobalt group for all of my stores.

I understand that dealer.com makes some things easy. But, I had to beg and plead to let them give me access to my Meta data.

I wanted to integrate my blog on my site. I could have done it for free - they charged me $299 and another $99 per month if I remember. And, their blog sucks.

Want to add social media icons? Guess what, they will charge you for that too! Meanwhile there are probably 100 wordpress plugins doing the same thing for free.

I would even go so far as saying that TCD is a joke. Toyota's taking over new car PPC here soon, and I am switching my used car's to Moore and Scarry's Haystack system. Tired of paying 10% to dealer.com - Moore and Scarry charges a flat fee.

I really think that dealer.com has seen the end of their days. They aren't really innovative anymore - just adding bullshit and discounting it to sign you up for 2 more years.

 

[davidmoon]

I've never been too impressed with Dealer.com's front end. It seems like if a dealer isn't constantly shoveling money into it, it gets old, stale and outdated quickly--and that's often is apparent to the consumer. And I hear a lot of gripes about value from dealers here.

Developing a site is a large undertaking. Perhaps a hybrid situation like Joe's might be something to seriously look into.

It's a shame that dealer.com doesn't have a Wordpress Engine that will put a little flexibility and power in the dealer's hands, but offer some of the benefits of dealer.com's response and data services.