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Cargurus, Please tell me how this benefits your customer (aka... The Dealer)????

Rick Buffkin

Sausage King of Chicago
Oct 29, 2009
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So how exactly does placing an Avg. Price Paid on the New Car listing benefit your customer? The cars already have sale prices on them. What purpose does having a Avg. Paid Price on the vehicle serve except to undermine the dealers selling price and create confusion for the customers. Please don't give some BS answer about transparency!


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It's a consumer confidence point. Oh wow these guys aren't skinning me alive, I'll contact them. CarGurus and many others play double agent in this arena. They bill the dealer (their only customers), but they have to pander to consumers to get them to convert from a visit to a lead.
Now if dealers were more in tune with other metrics other than "are you stuffing my CRM with leads" then they might not have to do some of this gimmicky crap to get consumers to fill out their information.
 
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Thanks for your reply @Brendan Dolan. I understand your point but there are so many other ways to show this if they insist on showing it by showing it else where on the site. All this does is create doubt in the customers mind. They see a price on a car and they think they can buy that car for that price. This is close to the same BS that CarJoJo is doing. The difference is we are actually sending pricing info to Cargurus. Back to my original question. How does this benefit the dealer? How does it benefit the dealer when the dealer is displaying a sale price on a vehicle and the site provider decides to show transaction prices lower than the dealers sale price. Think about all the time and energy put into this BS. Why would they not try and develop something to actually help build value in the dealers product. thats being displayed on the website instead of only focusing on price.
 
@Rick Buffkin Not that I disagree with you but there is always an evolution of each business on how we present the product to customers, they become used to that, and a new trick must be found.

There is no doubt that lead counts are down yet we are selling more cars, so that tells us that lead count is lower because customers don't want to send leads and that presents a problem to 3rd party sites, right? New tricks must be put in place to try to measure what is happening on the sites.
 
@Rick Buffkin Not that I disagree with you but there is always an evolution of each business on how we present the product to customers, they become used to that, and a new trick must be found.

There is no doubt that lead counts are down yet we are selling more cars, so that tells us that lead count is lower because customers don't want to send leads and that presents a problem to 3rd party sites, right? New tricks must be put in place to try to measure what is happening on the sites.
I think that's Rick's point, 3rd parties would rather trick the shopper into contacting the dealer than displaying a realistic price. All Toyota dealers have to abide by new vehicle pricing rules, and there isn't thousand's of $$$ discount available on most dealer's advertised prices, so it causes trust issues right off the bat with shoppers. It wouldn't be that difficult to work with each OEM to understand their pricing standards or invoice percentages to get a more accurate estimate model.
 
To me, there is absolutely NO reason for that number to be there. I am growing very tired of paying sites to list my cars...so that vendor can then tell any prospective customer that I have a shitty price.

However, maybe a step farther here. How to they know what the vehicles were actually sold for? Are dealers giving them access to their DMS data? Or is that number a reflection of the "Average Listed Price"?

As some may know, I am an Independent Dealer. Several members of the Mass Independent Auto Dealers Association met with Car Gurus yesterday. The feedback that I got is that Car Gurus admitted how little they actually know about the Retail Automobile Industry. They were tech people that understood SEO extremely well, and they were able to direct an insane amount of traffic to their website. They are learning the other side as they go. There were several issues discussed, the least of which was their "Good Deal, Fair Deal" value indicator or arrow that appears on their site.

I don't know what to tell you @yagoparamo . It seems like a piece of data that nothing good can come from.
 
I think that's Rick's point, 3rd parties would rather trick the shopper into contacting the dealer than displaying a realistic price. All Toyota dealers have to abide by new vehicle pricing rules, and there isn't thousand's of $$$ discount available on most dealer's advertised prices, so it causes trust issues right off the bat with shoppers. It wouldn't be that difficult to work with each OEM to understand their pricing standards or invoice percentages to get a more accurate estimate model.

Exactly. They need some sort of hook to get a customer to fill out the lead form. Why do they need to do that? Because we're obsessed with tangibles, and we need leads. Regardless that leads are down, WE NEED LEADS! Stuff the CRM full of leads! I'll cancel you and Autotrader unless I get the Glenngary Leads NOW!

I'd rather look at metrics like 30 solid VDP's in 30 days, good engagement on the VDP, clicking through all photos, etc. A well merchandised car that has a good description (and not vAuto cheese) with a reasonable price will sell, and you don't need to justify leads to do it. Someone might fall in love with it online, not submit a lead, and walk in, and we all know the sales guy won't source them back Carguru's.

However, maybe a step farther here. How to they know what the vehicles were actually sold for? Are dealers giving them access to their DMS data? Or is that number a reflection of the "Average Listed Price"?

It's either last known listed price, or average listed price. I'd tell them to pound sand if they wanted access to my DMS.
 
Exactly. They need some sort of hook to get a customer to fill out the lead form. Why do they need to do that? Because we're obsessed with tangibles, and we need leads. Regardless that leads are down, WE NEED LEADS! Stuff the CRM full of leads! I'll cancel you and Autotrader unless I get the Glenngary Leads NOW!

I'd rather look at metrics like 30 solid VDP's in 30 days, good engagement on the VDP, clicking through all photos, etc. A well merchandised car that has a good description (and not vAuto cheese) with a reasonable price will sell, and you don't need to justify leads to do it. Someone might fall in love with it online, not submit a lead, and walk in, and we all know the sales guy won't source them back Carguru's.

@Brendan Dolan , I get what you are saying. I used to buy into your logic, but honestly am beginning to move the direction of the "lead".

I am going to go off here, and please understand that it is not at you Brendan. At what point did we all become such fucking pansies and focus all of our energy toward trying to figure out how to get a computer to sell a car? Just look at all of these clicks! Look at them...aren't they beautiful? Oh, wait...let me show you this graph too! I am not saying that analytics are a bad thing, but would like to note that a fucking lead isn't a bad thing either...certainly nothing that should warrant anyone looking down their nose at a peer that sees value in an actual human being that wants to buy a car.

I have a dealer in my market that subscribes to the Rich Dealer philosophy. This dealer does not show his inventory to anyone that will not provide their contact information. @JoePistell has talked about this strategy if memory serves me correctly. This dealer not only wants Leads, he is ALL ABOUT LEADS. He gets around 2,400 leads per month, sells 100 of those, stocks about 40 units, and knocks down about $3,000 a round. I am no mathematician, but I can do the quick math and see that to be a formula for success. Why does this business model work? Because this dealer cares about the Lead, not the click, not the time on site, not the pages per visit, not the User Experience, not any of it.

My point is not that we should all take our prices off our sites and shut down any and all 3rd party relationships. My point is that there are extremely successful dealers throughout our country that want a customer to sell a car to. They want a name and a phone number. They want to do business with people that will share that information with them. They want to avoid the invisible shopper, and want to take a counseling approach from the first contact. They understand that the "customer research" part of the journey is really just a waste of time for the customer because they figured out long ago that most people don't buy the vehicle that they came into the store to buy. They also knock it out of the park, and make a lot of money along the way.
 
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That's the fun part of this business @Tallcool1; we can all run our stores differently, and measure different KPI's. Through trial and error in my group, I found that not giving key information in certain areas would pop up the lead count, but lower the closing ratio. I also found that undercutting the market too much caused leads to skyrocket, but the customers were only the bargain hunters, and the gross went to shit. If I did a gimmick like CarGuru's and had a price to market tool on the VDP, or "Get EPrice" on my VDP, my gross went in the toilet.

By looking at the big picture and not just being focused on one metric, our group was able to get to 14-15 turns a year in used cars, at 3,500 a copy. Again, no magic bullet, but it was the right cars, merchandised the first day, priced right, and monitored daily for VDP's, leads, demos, working with F&I and the desk to make sure we sold products on the deals, and didn't discount the cars much once the customers arrived, etc.

I also had to realize that the better job we did merchandising the car, the less people would email or call in, and the more they'd just show up. Talk about a pain in the ass for attribution...but show the customer 35+ photos, write a real description, post that if the ad is live the car is still here, etc, and why do they need to contact you? To say hi? Let them drop in, and let the human to human interaction do the rest.

Part of the fun of the car biz is that it's a moving target, and it's an ever changing puzzle on how to move units while making money.