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

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#51
joe.pistell said:
Dealer's are lead sluts
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This. The strategic business plan for every automotive vendor..

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#52
Tallcool1 said:
I am told that they are doing regional price comparison, not National. This is going way back (couple years) so I don't know if this is still accurate. The comparison data set does NOT match the particular search parameters, but does basically fit the region that the car is geographically located within. So say that someone runs a zip code based search and wants to look within 100 miles of that zip. The price comparison data will NOT consist of the vehicles that were filtered within that 100 miles. It will be the regional data set.
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Based on @Chris Leslie's example it is obvious vAuto and CarGurus are either:

a) looking at very different data sets and/or
b) "regional" vs "market" data comparisons are not using the same parameters

Regardless, it makes things difficult when CarGurus does not share how things are done.

Tallcool1 said:
I poked around a little bit, and found this article. This is from last year, so there is certainly a chance that things have changed since this was published. I have reached out to several peers to find out who doesn't send them a feed. Where the challenge lies is that many of their website providers likely send a feed and the dealer doesn't even know it. carsforsale would be a good example of one of those providers.

https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/copyright-infringement-on-a-website-the-82587/
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Good find! Even though this hasn't been tested in US courts (that we know of), I think it helps any dealer to make an argument to a CarGurus rep.
 
#54
Tallcool1 said:
I poked around a little bit, and found this article. This is from last year, so there is certainly a chance that things have changed since this was published. I have reached out to several peers to find out who doesn't send them a feed. Where the challenge lies is that many of their website providers likely send a feed and the dealer doesn't even know it. carsforsale would be a good example of one of those providers.

https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/copyright-infringement-on-a-website-the-82587/
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But it doesn't count if it happened in Canada. ;)

That is interesting. I'm going to assume that they dropped the scraping after that ruling. Boy, it would be great if someone from CarGurus would just officially set us all straight. I know you are watching...:hello:

Go ahead and drop in an official statement addressing this all just like you did here (at a really horrible dealer Forum that no one here should spend time on...kidding) https://www.drivingsales.com/langley-steinert/blog/20130521-the-truth-about-cargurus?source=search . Sorry @Alex Snyder
 
#55
I should mention that I am a paying CarGurus customer and for the most part am happy with their service. I get some leads and will occasionally sell one of them. HOWEVER, I shut down Cars.com and AutoTrader which leaves me with only CarGurus. I attribute pretty much anything from more than 20 miles away from me to CarGurus, unless the customer can tell me positively what brought them in. With that logic in play, I believe I do pretty well with them.

However, I really wish they would stop evaluating my pricing without knowing what my car is. As this thread began, what is the value in that? Does it help their customer (the paying dealer)? Does it actually help their site usage numbers? What would change if they just turned that feature off tomorrow, and monitored it for 60 days? I still believe that there is nothing good coming from that information, and especially for the consumer that is purchasing the vehicles.
 
#56
There are no villains in this game BUT if I had to point to one it would be Cox.. Autotrader has been comparing market pricing for years on both new and used.. take a look at your new car listing in YOUR dealer portal. The only difference here is Cargurus built their business around it.

How many of you had a DDC website that included the free basic Cargurus lisintgs?.. How many of you bitched about it when Cox bought DDC and those free listings disappeared and were forced to pay?.. How many of you negotiated with DDC and Cargurus for a better price on for both your DDC site and the monthly Cargurus fee?... I indeed was one of those dealers, I have sinced moved on to a dealeron site, ironically enough in typical Cox fashion I still receive the email from DDC to alert me of a Cargurus listing, laughable.

Cargurus will pull vehicles that are listed online that are NOT within the market range that a customer is searching and ONLY if there are zero or a maybe just a few available in their market area, this is how their free listings work.. this is why you may receive a lead from Florida and you are in Pa. So whats the big deal about that, who cares if they scrape sites to accommodate a customer and MAYBE you sell a car along the way?

Every day I start with Homenet and move to Autotrader and end with Cargurus making sure my inventory is listed correctly and accurately. They all have their nuances, Cars.com was the worst lead generator for my store and typically had the most listing issues. Ask your Cars.com rep how they are catering to Carvana, this may be more important to you than Cargurus generating 100s of lead a month for your store.
 
#60
Dan Sayer said:
Wait, what? Can you expand on that?
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Of course.. they allow Carvana to market “out of market” inventory into your market.. they cater to them because they are a delivery service and their inventory is applied differently.

I started noticing out of area inventory of theirs suppressing our inventory, when I asked my rep about it he knew this is happening and has been having trouble convincing dealers of their stance on “delivery service” which they claim accommodates consumers therefore it’s not a big deal.

To me this is a big deal, low lead generation and an uneven playing field.
 
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