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Carvana Partnering With Dealerships - Partner Inventory?

Sounds like partner dealers had to sign an NDA and couldn’t discuss.

Thanks for sharing! I was wondering why I was being ignored when reaching out to a few dealers for more information on this.
 
The author reached out to me on the 7th asking if I knew of any dealers and I couldn't remember where it was in the Forum. Fast forward to today, saw your update @Jeff Kershner, saw the mention of Todd looking back through the thread, went to send Greg the information while reading his article and realized he found it on his own. I have no information of any value LOL. I did reach out to Carvana at the time of original post by @Zach Houseknecht but never heard back from them after multiple tries. Still going to try and see how it works.
 
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Always points back to one truth in this industry, "He who has the cars, wins the game." And one of the key rules of the game has always been and will continue to be, "You don't have own them to sell them and make money. You just have to have access to them"- its called Inventory Sourcing, and Carvana, Carmax, AutoNation and the other goliaths are leveraging their size and scale to dominate the traditional sources - eventually at the expense of small-medium sized independent dealers - think mom-and-pop hardware stores, then came Home Depot/Lowes and now Amazon. The auto industry is huge and still extremely fragmented market shares, but the big guys keep getting bigger and that's how it happen over time.

Any dealers out there feel good about going to auction the past 3-4 years? Prices are up, buy fees are way up and margins for average independents are falling (hard to compete against no-haggle, high volume, tech-savvy retail giants). I don't want to sound like the sky is falling, because it isn't (noticably) and I am not here trying to sell anything. But, I will share with everyone who will listen - if you haven't considered "consignment" as an untapped, proven inventory source, then you should at least look into it (again, "you don't have to own it to sell it and make money"). Consignment isn't the cure all and its not going to replace the traditional sources (auction, trade-in, etc.), but its a safe arena (source) for now where the giants aren't playing.

Hit me up if you want more info about how consignment works for dealers. I am a small independent dealer (since 2013) and also Founder & CEO of Retail My Ride - the first & only online platform (free) that helps fellow dealers source their inventory through professional consignment.

I am interested in more info about how consignment works for dealers.


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AutoNews published a long article on Carvana's Marketplace experiment (paywall protected, unfortunately): Mostly, it's auto industry stock analysts giving their opinions on the risks and opportunities of Marketplace from Carvana's perspective. The article also interviewed one dealer, Janet Martin-Clark, president of Martin Chevrolet-Buick-GMC in Cleveland, Texas, who received an invitation from Carvana to participate. She declined, saying, "I can't imagine what dealer would agree to that because we can sell our vehicles just like they can online."

Otherwise not much news here. Carvana isn't speaking and dealers who participate have to sign NDAs.

Anyone else get the Marketplace invitation from Carvana?
 
partner inventory june 2022SM.jpgThis is what a Carvana Marketplace listing looks like today. You can see above the year/make/model there's a light grey word, "Partner". This distinguishes it as a car owned by a third-party dealership. Of course, the photography is also very different: the photo was taken at the partner's lot, with all signage obscured to discourage the customer from trying to find the car on the partner's website. The badging used to be more obvious, but now it's just light grey -- you hardly notice it.
 
Carvana seems to be opening their marketplace up to more dealers, I was just served this ad on LinkedIn


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From everything I'd heard before, the Marketplace project was experimental and on an invitation-only basis. Carvana doesn't discuss it in their quarterly calls with analysts, only to say it's not had a "material impact" on revenue. I asked Carvana PR is anything's changed they said this:

Veronica Cardenas​

Jun 30, 2022, 5:54 PM (15 hours ago)
to me

Hi Greg,

Thanks for reaching out. We don't have any information to share at the moment. This page is a marketing page for dealers we work with today, it isn't linked from our main site and it is sent on an invitation basis. We do, however, encourage all dealers to buy cars through our auction, CarvanaACCESS.

Thanks,
Veronica