Can too many Vehicle Photos be a bad thing?

[Chris Cachor]

For one, all dealers I worked with are made to force a customer into their process. That part really sucks, but I get it and am planning to expand on this further. It has given me some excellent ideas for new product!

That was my experience as well. There is a single sales funnel that is not very adaptable. I think if there's any innovation in the dealership sales process, it's here. I can see it begin to happen when a dealer's website starts being recognized (in $$$) as another profit center of the business.

 

[Tallcool1]

Doesn't matter how many are asking simple questions that could and should have been answered via thorough photos - the bottom line is that I have no actual relationship with these various sites powered by Vast yet they scrape MY INVENTORY to generate traffic to put $$ in their pocket - furthermore, the lack of an actual relationship leads to inaccuracies - cars being listed after they are sold, incomplete dealer information, leads that never actually get delivered to my CRM etc. which make MY DEALERSHIP look like we are still playing the bait and switch game or are non responsive...all of which leads to TRUST erosion and damages MY BRAND.

Believe me - if there was a way to keep my inventory OFF these sites, I would remove it in a heartbeat.

@eddyshaf

I have been doing some pretty heavy duty bot blocking on my site over the past 60 days, in an effort to keep my cars off of these sites......for the same reasons you are describing. In addition to your concerns, I have another one that goes like this:

I am not a vAuto dealer, and honestly have no desire to be. I don't want to get into a conversation about the benefits of vAuto, I am using vAuto as an example. ONE of vAuto's benefits is market price awareness in order to manipulate SRP ranking on sites that sort by price (cars.com for example). It is very frustrating to price my cars aggressively, and then have vAuto poll these free sites so that their dealers can then club me over the head with my own data.

But here is the problem, this data is coming from the 3rd party marketplaces that you are currently paying...such as cars.com. Your current vendors are passing your data on. Vast doesn't have to scrape your site. They just hop in bed with your vendors, and there is ultimately nothing you can do about it, other than demand they don't do it or don't do business with the 3rd party marketplaces.

I spoke with Brian Pasch about this a couple weeks ago, and his response was very much like @Jeff Kershner talked about on the last page. Use photo overlays that have a LOT of information on them. Slip in a couple "slides" that actually direct customers to your website rather than submit any type of form lead that could be directed to another dealer that is a subscriber.

I basically understand your frustration, but due to my inexperience I admit that I don't understand it nearly as well as you do.

 

[eddyshaf]

Clint - thanks for the added insight. While I don't fundamentally disagree with photo overlays, it does go against my data driven desire to properly source the leads so I can generate a proper ROI...

 

[Jeff Kershner]

How many of the submissions on the 9 photo vehicles are "Does it have navigation" or "Does it have leather seats?"

Taken from my comment/post on page 2 incase you overlooked it...

2. Slight increase in phone calls from the listing sites - "does the car have this or that" type of calls.

The small increase in calls, with questions like you are referring to, from the marketplace sites did increase. Though properly trained phone expert will many times turn these questions/calls into an appointment.

Looking at the increase in referral traffic to the dealership website, the customer was seeking and finding (on the dealer site) the answer to their question before calling.

 

[Jeff Kershner]

Having not seen a "Car Story" presentation of value validation before I thought I would search out of few of their "Dealers" to get a better idea of what the product is. I have slept since then, so I honestly don't remember which ones I looked at, but if memory serves it was 5 or 6 of the ones listed on their page in the section "A Few CarStory Dealers".

All but one of the sites I looked at were NOT using Car Story, and in fact...one of them has moved to Pure Cars!

I see Kim already explained this, but I too wanted to help clarify a few things...

CarStory has an online widget but from what I know, this is fairly new and it's not the full "CarStory vehicle presentation". My dealers use CarStory on the showroom floor as a tool to use with the customer within the mobile tablet. It's not used on the dealer's site. We use it as it was originally intended, face to face with the customer.

My dealers also use PureCars Value Reports, on their websites. They also use it within their follow-up (great for long term follow-up Ed).

There's currently not much overlay between the 2 products, though I have a feeling this could change in the future and both companies build out their feature sets. I'm a fan of both. Use, recommend and tech dealers how to utilize both.

 

[Jeff Kershner]

Doesn't matter how many are asking simple questions that could and should have been answered via thorough photos - the bottom line is that I have no actual relationship with these various sites powered by Vast yet they scrape MY INVENTORY to generate traffic to put $$ in their pocket - furthermore, the lack of an actual relationship leads to inaccuracies - cars being listed after they are sold, incomplete dealer information, leads that never actually get delivered to my CRM etc. which make MY DEALERSHIP look like we are still playing the bait and switch game or are non responsive...all of which leads to TRUST erosion and damages MY BRAND.

Believe me - if there was a way to keep my inventory OFF these sites, I would remove it in a heartbeat.

If you give Vast a call, I believe they will block or turn off any associated inventory feeds.

 

[ed.brooks]

...the bottom line is that I have no actual relationship with these various sites powered by Vast yet they scrape MY INVENTORY to generate traffic to put $$ in their pocket...

@eddyshaf, I understand your frustration - there are some disreputable vendors out there - but, from what I understand, Vast isn't one of them. I've never heard of Vast scraping dealers' inventory. Chances are, if you use a sticker company or inventory syndication service (Dealer Specialties, HomeNet, AutoUpLink, etc) they've made syndication to these no-cost sites a feature that they tout. I've sold inventory syndication to dealers that wanted to make sure that these sites are included -- they really do have substantial reach.

 

[eddyshaf]

@Ed Brooks - thanks for the insight - despite the substantial reach and your belief that Vast is not disreputable, I still feel that I am probably missing leads from their network due to improper setup for lead delivery which damages our reputation in the community.

 

[ed.brooks]

@Ed Brooks - thanks for the insight - despite the substantial reach and your belief that Vast is not disreputable, I still feel that I am probably missing leads from their network due to improper setup for lead delivery which damages our reputation in the community.

If you find any value in any of these sites, my advice is to occasionally audit a few vehicles (Google the VINs), send in form-fill lead requests and see what leads come back. If you don't get a lead back (or if it comes back incorrectly) reach out to the publisher and correct the information they have. These sites have a lot eyeballs.

 

[yagoparamo]

@eddyshaf, I understand your frustration - there are some disreputable vendors out there - but, from what I understand, Vast isn't one of them. I've never heard of Vast scraping dealers' inventory. Chances are, if you use a sticker company or inventory syndication service (Dealer Specialties, HomeNet, AutoUpLink, etc) they've made syndication to these no-cost sites a feature that they tout. I've sold inventory syndication to dealers that wanted to make sure that these sites are included -- they really do have substantial reach.

Ed,

Just because you use a feed instead of a scraping technique your site doesn't become validated.

I don't want to discuss Vast's business model, it is not my place to discuss so I'm generally stating the following:

Using dealer's data without a direct agreement for each site should be illegal. The data is used to generate leads via long tail indexing or networks outside the dealer's reach to generate leads than are sold to companies that in turn sell them back to the dealers.

On one hand you can take this as a positive; Vast has a private network with a defined audience, they generate leads with the dealer's inventory, the dealer has the opportunity to buy those.

On the other hand you can take it as a negative; Vast is getting leads out of the market that otherwise would have found me via my advertising and I would have gotten that customer.

Are these networks thinning down my ability to be relevant?

I don't know the answer to that but at least I advocate that the dealer should be the one making the choice.