BUSTED Spincar caught selling dealer data

[Alex Snyder]

2021 EDIT: It has almost been 3 years since this post was originally started. In that time I have gotten to know the people at SpinCar and do not have the same fears of them I did. In the coming months I plan to work with them to combat the bad perception we started with this thread.

DealerRefresh fights for car dealers. We will bubble the best solutions to the top for dealers and call-out the ones who are doing bad things when we are aware of them. And when we are wrong, we are man enough to say we were.



—————Original Post—————

Huge shout out to Jeffrey Tognetti at DealerX for pointing this out. Folks, there is no other way to say this other than….

It is soooooo fucked up when a vendor you trust, and pay, takes your customer's data and sells it for their own profit.

How much of this is going on? Can we start a list of the assholes doing this crap?



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[Rick Buffkin]

I'm extremely curious as to how much money their making off of that data! Is it enough to completely breach their bond of trust with the dealer who is paying for their services?

 

[Alexander Lau]

Ouch and I always thought Spincar was a good group. If this is real, that's bad.

 

[joe.pistell]

I'm extremely curious as to how much money their making off of that data! Is it enough to completely breach their bond of trust with the dealer who is paying for their services?

Consider that your car shoppers data from your website that your 'trusted vendor' sells to the open market is MOST VALUABLE TO YOUR COMPETITORS. For example, if you're in Newark NJ, you don't give a sh*t about 'in-market' car shopper data from Phoenix AZ.

Summary: Your car shoppers data -- that you paid thousands upon thousands of dollars to create each month -- could be bought by your competitor for a pennies on the dollar.

Wow. This is nuts.

 

[joe.pistell]

It's more than SpinCar, it's an epidemic.
Cox just his this Marketing Director's radar


https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6431126473041604608/

 

[joe.pistell]

Want to see which vendors are on your website? Goto: https://builtwith.com/

Prepare yourself to be amazed.

 

[Tallcool1]

I was a Spincar dealer for quite awhile. I liked everyone that I dealt with, and seldom ever had difficulty getting someone on the phone if I had questions or needed help.

Their photo app was cool, and we got several compliments or comments from customers.

We were paying for re-marketing or re-targeting, or whatever you want to call it. There was just something about the traffic they were charging me for. In my mind, I am paying them for clicks to my website. There should be absolutely zero variation between what they said I got for clicks vs what Google Analytics said I got for clicks. It never matched. There was often as much as a 40% difference. They said 500 clicks, GA said 300 clicks. Each time I brought this up, I was given a reason why this is common...and I paid my bill.

Eventually, I just didn't feel good about it anymore and cancelled.

There was just something "funky" about that traffic. Even someone with my very limited amount of expertise with this type of thing could tell that something wasn't passing the smell test.

 

[joe.pistell]

Oh no! DealerInspire too?

Jeffrey Tognetti tells me that DealerInspire is doing the same thing… selling dealer shopper data to Nielsen owned company eXelate.

DealerInspire, is this true?

 

[Steve Stauning]

I liked everyone that I dealt with, and seldom ever had difficulty getting someone on the phone if I had questions or needed help.

I don't know anything about the folks at SpinCar, but I can tell you that of all the fraudsters, con artists and cheaters I've uncovered in automotive digital marketing, they were all described as "really nice people" by the dealers they were screwing.

 

[joe.chura]

Oh no! DealerInspire too?

Jeffrey Tognetti tells me that DealerInspire is doing the same thing… selling dealer shopper data to Nielsen owned company eXelate.

DealerInspire, is this true?

We NEVER sold and never would sell any data. Never had a relationship with Excelate or Nielson. I've never even had a discussion with them.