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Combined Inventory - Can't we all just get along..

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ehoopman

ehoopman

Full Sticker + Prep
Apr 13, 2009
23
1
First Name
Eric
#1
Alright - searched and haven't seen this one out there recently and it's constantly a hot topic over here at DealerFire and with our dealers.

Does your dealership combine the inventory from other dealers in your group on the individual dealer rooftop websites?

  • If yes, what are the rules you landed on applying to this inventory?
  • If yes, how are you calling out vehicle location to avoid confusion on consumer end? (so that they don't drive an hour out of their way to see a vehicle that's physically not located there..)
  • If yes, How are you routing leads for vehicles that are not "yours"?
  • If no, why did you decide on this direction and is there display schema that would change your mind to combine?
FYI we are pro combine of used vehicle inventory and have done so with about a dozen different rules attached. Ordering by Make/By Location/By Make Then Location/ By Price/All Mixed Up/Where to Route Leads/ Establishing Visitor Location and working it backwards.. etc etc

Curious to hear everyones take on this topic.

All the best - Eric
 
#2
I hope the dealer groups in my area don't read this thread, I prefer the turf wars and infighting they all do now.

Shoppers want a "one stop supermarket experience" but THE PAY PLAN breaks them down into small lil' fiefdoms.


Long live the king... Long live the pay plan that divides my enemy!!
 
#4
@Eric

I like the combo model and have a number of clients that do that with their inventory as well as specialized listing sites that we create as microsites. The larger inventory pool gives dealers better tools to fight against lead collectors. Also, in larger dealer groups, there are always sites that rank better than others do to search volume.

Combining inventory can give some of the lower volume dealers in the group some extra search authority. In fact, if you take this to an extreme, the search visibility of sites like AutoTrader and Cars.com in the begining dominated search results due to the massive amounts of "matches" they had in their database.

The rules are easy to set in that the leads go to the dealer where the car is located, with some parameters on the proximity of the dealers in the group. One 20+ rooftop franchise we know has a central site in Denver and then another one in Maine because that's where most stores are clustered.

The new Automotive Advertising Network that I designed takes the "roll-up" concept to new levels by creating national, regional and local roll-ups while protecting the dealer's car detail page. AAN listing pages do not display competitors cars or ads. In the AAN, member dealers benefit from the combined inventory but when a consumer lands on their car listing page, there are no distractions. So, it is a dealer centric design.
 
#5
I've used this feature in the past and it works well when the dealer rooftops play nice with each others. It really depends on each dealer.

From a lead, conversion and seo standpoint it makes a lot of sense to do this.

Many website companies have not figured out how to "set the rules" so when you combine the inventory from other dealers in your group, you can only send to 1 lead management tool. That can cuase turmoil across the dealers, pending on how lead routing is set up in the CRM.
 
#6
@jeff did you notice that jeff. Brian joined the conversation and your thread page views doubled :) thanks Brian! On the "figured out" front i'm not sure how that is. You should be able to route leads to individual email addresses in XML or plain text. Multi routing should just mean multi destinations with email addresses and a definition as to format. I guess it's good for us that we can apply these rules. Thought it would be pretty standard issue by now though.

I guess the better question is can you see any viable reason NOT to combine inventory? Other then not having a working system?

@Brian Love the new website(s) you need some inventory in Wisconsin. Let's talk! Wisconsin New and Used Cars | Moo Fuel | All Vehicles For Sale in WI is our WIP with some of our cars in wi already loaded in..

All the best - Eric
 
#7
NADA says that nearly 90% of the people that call your dealership buy a different vehicle than the one they called on*.

Think about that.

Your shopper is looking for an affordable SUV with a 3rd row, that's decent on gas. If you break all your web inventory into rooftops, you've blown the magic & power of a "unified front" that speaks to your customers needs.

Its simple (its the Pay Plan that makes it difficult).

You have a shopper that's "just looking". Do you hand the shopper a brochure to one store, or, a catalog for all your inventory. Which one gets read more? Which one gets saved for shopping references?

The proof cannot be debated.

Look at the site traffic stats of a single roof store with 300 units vs a multi-roof complex with 2000 units that has a single website presentation. All the metrics explode: Time on site, # of pages seen, visitor loyalty, visitor regency, they all go up. They end up so high that you'll rival stats that cars.com and autotrader.com enjoy.

Shopping time is NOT unlimited.
The more your stores absorb the shoppers time, the less time your shopper has to spend on other sites. This added time allows you to really hammer home the "value added" goodies that your mega complex offers.

Geographical problems?
CarSense & CarMax: Install a "sniffer" to geo-locate the shopper and "suggest" a store closest to you.
Used Cars Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, New Jersey - CARSENSE - Used BMW, Honda, Nissan, Ford & More
CarMax - Browse used cars and new cars online

Look at the unified front Kevin Leigh's WestHerr.com puts up. Amazing Selection of New and Used cars "FREE TRANSFER to a West Herr facility closer to you." Glad he's not in my back yard ;-)


*thnx Jerry T
 
#8
ehoopman said:
Does your dealership combine the inventory from other dealers in your group on the individual dealer rooftop websites?
Click to expand...

Yes Eric we do combine our inventory in many different ways. We have a single DMS account for our entire group where everything is differentiated by company number. This allows us to not only combine and split inventory efficiently, but also customer records, parts, accounting and anything else that is in our DMS.

As long as you know our stores' numbers (Honda = 1, Toyota = 2, etc) then you can write all kinds of rules around us. We have been able to do some very cool stuff with this in our CRM, marketing campaigns, and fixed ops programs. The simplest thing is inventory.

Here is a search on our website for Used Nissans. We do not carry Nissan new, so this is a good search for this example: Used Car VA | Norfolk Virginia Beach Used Cars For Sale - notice the store name on the location in each vehicle pane (no need to click into the listings). If you do click "View Details" then you'll get the address and map to the applicable store. This is all pretty easy, but it is only easy because we set our DMS up to be a large single database.
 
#9
We have combined dealers inventories for quite some time. We give them the option to send leads to the location of the vehicle or to the store where the inventory is posted. We have some dealers who only show the stores name while other only show a phone number to the individual store. All in all, I think every dealer has their own process to manage this but like Joe said, the SEO and customer experience really makes since in combining multiple rooftops if you have a good process in place on how to handle these customers.
 
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