Cars.com acquires Dealer Inspire

[Alex Snyder]

Cars.com announced this morning it is acquiring the Chicago-based automotive retail technology firm Dealer Inspire and its digital advertising agency Launch Digital Marketing.

http://www.thebanksreport.com/home-page/cars-com-acquires-dealer-inspire/

Congrats to @joechura! This is inspirational to all automotive entrepreneurs. Quite the fast, successful, ride :thumbup:

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[john.quinn]

More evidence that on the Sales-Digital Marketing front, there's just not that much more opportunity, so to grow, you must acquire?

All the venders getting soooooo far into the weeds with macro-solutions to solve bit "problems" around retail sales automotive.

 

[Alex Snyder]

Lots to digest for sure @JQuinn. My head just traveled into the CarGurus waters. They're now competing against two companies that also supply dealers with software solutions.

 

[joe.pistell]

This marriage doesn't solve the really big opportunity… OUR WEBSITES SUCK (& thats why ecommerce is dead )

 

[Jeff Kershner]

Congratulations to @joechura and the team at Dealer Inspire. Here is the actual Press Release - https://www.cars.com/articles/carsc...e-and-launch-digital-marketing-1420699058441/

 

[Alexander Lau]

It was just a matter of time before they were acquired by a major group. Their explosive growth and far superior provisions made them remarkable. I once told my boss at a former employer who was developing a Cold Fusion / CFML proprietary system, that one day an auto website group would leverage an open source platform like WordPress and make many millions doing it (no need to update the core, as the open source community would do it, many themes had already been created = the paths had already been set for automotive implementation for DI, plenty of solvent plug-ins that could be generically used by a dealer and/or a group like DI would create new (autocentric) ones based upon them, etc.), circa 9 years ago. I've been boasting their wares for some time, so a big congratz to @joechura and Matthew Cole (co-founder).

Cars.com will pay $165 million in cash for Dealer Inspire. There are additional incentives up to $40 million for over-performance over a three-year period. Someone is smiling...

 

[Rick Buffkin]

Guys, I have a question about this and acquisitions in general. Maybe you guys can shed some insights for me. The question surrounds the customer shopper data. So does Cars now have access to all the dealers customer shopper / DMS data that was stored in DI's databases???

 

[Alex Snyder]

Guys, I have a question about this and acquisitions in general. Maybe you guys can shed some insights for me. The question surrounds the customer shopper data. So does Cars now have access to all the dealers customer shopper / DMS data that was stored in DI's databases???

Only someone from Cars.com or Dealer Inspire can answer that directly. But that does kinda fit in the definition of ownership don't it?

 

[craigh]

Guys, I have a question about this and acquisitions in general. Maybe you guys can shed some insights for me. The question surrounds the customer shopper data. So does Cars now have access to all the dealers customer shopper / DMS data that was stored in DI's databases???

Each Wordpress site likely has that data stored separately.
The trick will be if they use a third party tracking tool to track visits from Cars.com and DealerInspire together, offering new attribution data.
But yes, they own all the data that comes with the company, which certainly has value if DI has been tracking it properly.

 

[Rick Buffkin]

Thats what I was thinking @Alex Snyder. I'm sure most of the dealers that have a DI site, it's business as usual but... my thoughts are, now a 3rd party that the dealer possibly didn't have an agreement with, now has acquired all of his / her shopper data.