Carsforsale.com

[Ryan Everson]

You may have the record for a revived thread, @Ryan Everson! The gap between the last post and your's is over 9 years LOL
I do agree with what you said. They fly under the radar because of their cost per month. They make it difficult to cancel and they'll even give you three months free if you want to cancel so you likely forget about it (I did that). Ultimately, very few leads and sales over the years. Figured cost per sale ended up at around $400 to $500 per which doesn't sound bad unless you compare it to our average. That annual cost of $8,000-$9,000 for the group could be spent else where.

Lol I wanted to vent about wasting 2 hours on the phone with their rude support without creating a whole new thread.

But yeah CarsForSale is good for 2 sets of dealers:

1) Small independent dealers who can’t afford a full-featured website. The $99 price point for a dealership website is tough to beat.

2) Dealers with a ton of used inventory (200+) that can help overcome the typical low lead volume it usually generates.

For the average dealer, even at the low $99 price point, the ROI usually doesn’t pencil. That being said, I’ve seen dealers waste a lot more money on stuff like poor performing used dynamic SEM campaigns.

Ultimately, I just wanted to shine a light on an expense that is probably flying under the radar at a lot of dealerships. Good luck cancelling though, they make it very difficult

 

[NickA]

We gave carsforsale.com a try with very poor results. 3 of my 4 stores have already dropped it. My remaining store has received a whopping 2 leads YTD. Very inexpensive at $99 a month, so you may find the exposure alone worth the price. I just wouldn't expect your CRM to fill up with leads. Your market may see different results.

 

[Ryan Everson]

We gave carsforsale.com a try with very poor results. 3 of my 4 stores have already dropped it. My remaining store has received a whopping 2 leads YTD. Very inexpensive at $99 a month, so you may find the exposure alone worth the price. I just wouldn't expect your CRM to fill up with leads. Your market may see different results.

Yeah we’ve seen similar lackluster results with carsforsale in several markets across the country.

$99 might not seem like much, but it would be much better spent on Facebook automotive inventory ads. $99 on Facebook goes a long way when you can get in-market vdp views for ~20 cents.

 

[FrankPerez0210]

Terrible.

Some of our stores fell for their 3-6 month free gimmick and forgot about it since it's a minimal $99 /mo expense.

To be fair, it's really easy to forget about something that (if we're lucky) only generates 1 lead every couple of months.

I never realized we were signed up either until a bill recently landed on my desk. I submitted a cancellation request for the stores in our group on January 26th which they apparently didn't process because I'm not an authorized contact on the accounts (and the authorized contacts no longer work here or have since retired).

And boy do they make it difficult to cancel. After spending 90 minutes on the phone with them again they didn't even want to allow us to cancel with a letter from our auto group CFO.

So just wanted to post this as a reminder to check to see if your dealership is signed up and blindly paying the $99 /mo bill like we were. If so, check the ROI in your CRM and you'll most likely want to cancel too. +$100

I think CFS will work for us, but we are very small independent , small inventory barely getting the wheels rolling, hopefully we outgrow it VERY soon!