Cars.com Dealer Reviews Will Be Going Live Spring of 2011

[NickHummer]

I wanted to introduce myself to all the readers and contributors here. I'm the product manager for Dealer Reviews at Cars.com; I'll be doing an interview with Jeff for the site but I do want to make myself directly available for questions and feedback here, including why Cars.com will generate reviews instead of aggregating them.

When we set out to develop a reviews feature, it was important to create a level playing field on day one - all dealers will start fresh and have equal footing with reviews. For those already actively managing reputation and soliciting reviews, Cars.com will offer another opportunity to generate additional content that can be used to cement their online reputation. We'll also be notifying our dealers each and every time a review is posted to Cars.com (after undergoing validation and moderation, of course) so that you don’t have to spend extra time monitoring Cars.com or our backend tools.

Thanks to all of you for your feedback and thanks to Jeff and everyone at DealerRefresh for getting the conversation going. If you have direct questions or suggestions for me, don’t hesitate to ping me directly.

Nick Hummer
312- 601-6004 [email protected]

 

[Howard Goldman (blog)]

Nick. As a paying member of the cars.com club Id like to know how your company plans to arbitrate negative reviews? Have you considered a period of time to not display negative reviews like dealerrater so the dealer can respond? As pointed out by others, this is great for some and detrimental for others to the point of dropping use of cars.com.

 

[Joe Hobbs (blog)]

I am very disappionted that Cars.com & as I was told soon Autotrader.com is getting into the REVIEW buisness!! Don't they work for us the "Auto Dealer"! I pay cars.com over $6,000 a month for both dealerships to advertise My vehicles.......I am a top rated (Best of the Best) dealership so I am not as much worried about getting bad reviews but someone that works for me / advertises for me is going to show a non (5 star) review flatterying review is they day I take back my $6,000 dollars!

 

[Jason (blog)]

Consumers will not be able to post reviews on ATC. ATC will link to third party reviews.

 

[Gretchen Kennedy]

I love it! This is what the internet is about... transparency for all. Now you get to see how your competition is faring, as well, at least on AutoTrader.com and Cars.com. The shopper rules online, and they trust reviews from their peers far more than they trust a sales person. Managing brand/ dealer reputation should be a daily activity, and monitoring scattered social media conversations can be daunting, but one bad review sitting out there for three months before you discover it will prove how essential it really is to do. There are some very powerful tools out there to do it for you and help you review and respond (SocialDealer, GOSO, etc.)--even an aggregation tool like Google Alerts is better than nothing; but clearly, the time is upon us all to increase awareness of what shoppers are saying about us (and our competition)... and get in on the conversation.

Disclaimer: I work for HomeNet, and we are partners with SocialDealer... but that doesn't change the truth of my words.

 

[NickHummer]

Howard – thanks for the question (and for being a Cars.com partner).
We’re trying to be careful about making sure this is a feature dedicated to reputation management, and not one about arbitration and mediation. We also knew that making this process easy for ALL dealers is vitally important. We’ve built our initial process to consist of a consumer review (validated and moderated) and a dealer response (also moderated). The goal here is that we don’t want to encourage or require a back-and-forth between our dealers and our reviewers, but we still want to make sure dealers ALWAYS have the last word in the exchange. What we hope (and expect) to find, is that a positive response to a negative review will actually lead to a far better experience for our partners – our research shows that it’s often how a negative review is handled publically that has the biggest positive impact.

Feedback like this is exactly why we wanted to make our announcement now, two months before ANY dealership can choose early enrollment. We'll be in beta for at least the first half of the year, to give everyone (Cars.com included) a chance to really understand the impact of this new feature.
Nick

 

[@fikb]

Here is what Chip Perry the CEO of Autotrader has to say about their role in dealer ratings "We (autotrader) will help them (dealers) merchandise on AutoTrader the fact that they have a great reputation online." He goes on to say that Autotrader dealers will have the choice to opt in if they want the feature. - YouTube to watch it for yourself.....

 

[James Easter]

Not sure if it's a good idea for an advertiser such as Cars.com to be basically hosting reviews of its very own clients...a little up in the air on this one. The transparency continues to broaden, which I'm all for, but I'll think on this one for a bit.

 

[bphampto]

This is just another way for another vendor to squeeze every last penny out of the auto dealers. When does it stop? Will all you vendors be happy when we are out of business? Every new tool, vendor, review site, is another way to charge us money.

I can only imagine that Cars.com will charge some round number of about $499 per rooftop to be a "sponsored review dealer". This will line right up with their $275 for video, $425 for specials, and $500 for power positions.

When a company like Cars.com is owned and operated by a failing industry such as newspapers, you get this effect.

 

[Jason (blog)]

On the surface, it seems that the ability to "Opt In" to the dealer review service is the best of both worlds. This way, only the dealerships that want the reviews, get them.

My biggest concern would be that until you have at least 25+ reviews the "rating system" will be greatly affected by one negative review. Of course it is easy to say that if you are providing excellent customer service and vehicles there should be no worry, but everyone knows it is much easier for a person to spend a few minutes ranting online in a review than to write a glowing review.