Custom Website

[Alexander Lau]

im a very seasoned software engineer and have drafted up and created projects that needed alot more skill involved then a custom website. as for the third party vendors iv been working in marketing in the auto industry for 3 years and have a pretty good understanding of how they all work. As for the Dealership they sell over 300 cars a month and are not happy with dealer inspire which is understandable because it has pretty slow site speed looks like a wordpress site from 2012 and is just like every other car dealership out there. im more interested about the compliance between Honda and the website. i know some dealerships can only use approved verified vendors for things like there website??

IMO, they're asking you for a lot. The installation of the vendors might not be too bad, but nonetheless you'd be supporting an entire automotive web system on your own. I mean... seems like a lot to chew for one guy as talented as you might be.

 

[Devin Outfleet]

I hope you're charging $100K+ for this project and a significant monthly support fee because that is what's required to do a decent job. You would either need to charge an exorbitant amount to this dealer or have plans to scale with additional dealership clients.

I would ignore Reynolds & Reynolds and FirstLook and use vAuto to handle your inventory feed. If you contact vAuto, they will be able to upload a csv file to your ftp server with the dealership's entire inventory multiple times a day. Managing the inventory is the most complicated piece because of all the inconsistencies in color names, features, etc.

Gubagoo is a chat platform that simply requires placing some javascript on the site.

Honestly if I were you, I'd suggest working with Dealer Inspire to create whatever your client is working for. They can do some pretty awesome things and being on the Wordpress platform allows developers like you to easily create landing pages, etc.

What made the dealership want to move away from Dealer Inspire?

thank you for the advice. my plan is to scale with other dealership clients. that news on v auto is great a csv file will be no problem. they wanted to move away from dealer inspire because of the slow site speed. the cookie cutter website feeling and it being older technology that is just a website. there custom website will be able to do VR it will also be a lot faster for seo purposes. the design looks a lot cleaner and the overall feel and functionality of the website is a lot better. it will also double as an app. it will aid the service center in giving updates on there cars in service. Streamline there marketing with information capture and text updates. Overall it will be able to do more on the features side and the backed is a lot more useful.

 

[Alex Snyder]

to add some perspective they are trying to get rid of dealer inspire and have me build them a completely custom website. They also want it to work with the vendors they have now. Such as reynolds and reynolds, first look, v auto, gubagoo ect. They are a family owned licensed honda Dealership. thoughts on this ?

Good on this Honda store for trying to get out of the box :thumbup:

This quoted post is where you're going to have some issues. In order to integrate with all of these things it is going to cost you. A ReyRey integration is hundreds of dollars per month for one store. However, if you do that integration you won't need to have the Homenet/vAuto one. But you will need a way to decipher the inventory feed by "exploding the VIN" or at least boiling things into a single Chrome ID. Chrome is another integration you should look at.

Because they're a ReyRey dealership you're already looking at the most expensive integration costs. I think some of these other providers charge a bit more for ReyRey dealers because Reynolds charges a premium to them too.

You're going to need some help just understanding the various integrations alone. You need someone who has built automotive softwares in the past. Your dealership doesn't know how to navigate these waters. So, you might want to start recruiting.

And these integrations, alone, are going to take months to develop. Reynolds' backlog can be months to get into and they are not going to want to do business with you because you only represent a single store. They like to work with larger corporations that will pay them millions annually. Homenet and Chrome are easier to work with, but may push you off for the same reasons. They incur expense to set things up on their end too.

With that said, why does the dealership want a Reynolds integration for their website?

 

[Ryan Everson]

not happy with dealer inspire which is understandable because it has pretty slow site speed looks like a wordpress site from 2012

A lot of the site speed issues experienced on Dealer Inspire tend to be caused by large unoptimized images and third party scripts. Have you looked into this first?

is just like every other car dealership out there.

There's a reason that a lot of car dealership websites look similar - it keeps a user experience that customers are used to and that's not a bad thing. You can easily help them make it their own by using your developer skillset while still staying within the proven framework.

im more interested about the compliance between Honda and the website. i know some dealerships can only use approved verified vendors for things like there website??

We only have one Honda dealership in our group so I'm not as familiar with Honda's website vendor guidelines as I am with other brands. They are one of the more open manufacturers though, I just can't remember if they have a large list of approved website vendors or if it's completely open. Honda's Ad Compliance may be able to assist - [email protected] 888-414-3573

 

[Devin Outfleet]

IMO, they're asking you for a lot. The installation of the vendors might not be too bad, but nonetheless you'd be supporting an entire automotive web system on your own. I mean... seems like a lot to chew for one guy as talented as you might be.

haha i agree it would be a lot of work for just me impossible actually. i have a team under me for my marketing company and also a team of software engineers under me as well. they should be able to handle it.

 

[Ryan Everson]

thank you for the advice. my plan is to scale with other dealership clients. that news on v auto is great a csv file will be no problem. they wanted to move away from dealer inspire because of the slow site speed. the cookie cutter website feeling and it being older technology that is just a website. there custom website will be able to do VR it will also be a lot faster for seo purposes. the design looks a lot cleaner and the overall feel and functionality of the website is a lot better. it will also double as an app. it will aid the service center in giving updates on there cars in service. Streamline there marketing with information capture and text updates. Overall it will be able to do more on the features side and the backed is a lot more useful.

You're welcome!

Dealer Inspire was initially started under similar circumstances, an ad agency that was frustrated with all of the crappy website vendors. The advantage DI had was back when they started there were not a bunch of "great" website vendors, whereas you now have a much higher benchmark to overcome as there are many great website vendors, with DI being at or near the top. If you decide to still move forward, I sincerely wish you luck on your large ambitious project and hope it's a huge success.

However, since this project is easily going to take months and months to complete, I would highly recommend devoting some of your team's resources to continuing to improve their existing site so you don't leave the dealership at a standstill. Don't let the dealership give up on their current website by solely focusing on something coming way down the pipe.

 

[Devin Outfleet]

You're welcome!

Dealer Inspire was initially started under similar circumstances, an ad agency that was frustrated with all of the crappy website vendors. The advantage DI had was back when they started there were not a bunch of "great" website vendors, whereas you now have a much higher benchmark to overcome as there are many great website vendors, with DI being at or near the top. If you decide to still move forward, I sincerely wish you luck on your large ambitious project and hope it's a huge success.

However, since this project is easily going to take months and months to complete, I would highly recommend devoting some of your team's resources to continuing to improve their existing site so you don't leave the dealership at a standstill. Don't let the dealership give up on their current website by solely focusing on something coming way down the pipe.

yes im confident my product will be 5 times stronger then DI based off my work in the past and my vision for there website. Where would be the best place to start learning about all the different integrations and mechanisms and feeds that i will need. also i would love to talk to someone who has done this before if you guys have any recommendations?

 

[Ryan Everson]

yes im confident my product will be 5 times stronger then DI based off my work in the past and my vision for there website. Where would be the best place to start learning about all the different integrations and mechanisms and feeds that i will need. also i would love to talk to someone who has done this before if you guys have any recommendations?

I know you're extremely passionate about this but I would just urge you to help manage the dealer's expectations, because being 5x better than an already great platform will be difficult to achieve.

I'm not just saying this because I am biased towards Dealer Inspire, I walked in your shoes 4 years ago building a Wordpress website platform from scratch. It ultimately became too large of a burden with all of my other dealer group responsibilities where I could make a bigger impact to our bottom line.

It's a lot tougher to justify nowadays with some of the great alternatives like Dealer Inspire that are now mandated / co-oped by manufacturers. If you're a high volume or chain of used car dealerships, I would say it makes 100% sense to consider the custom route though.

I would recommend reaching out to Chad Sabatka with Steering Innovation and Joud Mansour with Dealer Venom as they have both been down this path. I would also recommend reaching out to Dealer Inspire, they are a great group and you may be surprised by what you can accomplish with them.

 

[ed.brooks]

What you are attempting is very difficult. I don't say that in an attempt to dissuade you, just saying it will require more work (and will require more time and/or money) than most people are willing to devote. Since you are new DealerRefresh I might suggest taking a look at one of the most popular -- perhaps THE most popular - threads on the Forums - Uncle Joe's Make Over Diary started by @joe.pistell in 2011. 39 pages and counting on what it may take to build a dream website.

It is worth noting that the dealership that is the subject of this lengthy dissertation and discussion is currently using a Dealer Inspire website.

 

[Alex Snyder]

This thread is turning into an answer to "why aren't there more vendors making a _______ product?" Or why isn't Microsoft/Amazon/Salesforce/etc. building tools for car dealers?

The barrier to entry is high. If a company doesn't have an experienced crew already that crew must be recruited.

Then there are these mostly automotive specific integrations:

• Inventory feed (ex. HomeNet)
• Inventory translator (ex. Chrome)
• OEM Rebates
• Financing Incentives
• Financing Rates
• Lease Residuals & Money Factors (ex. ALG)
• Taxes
• OEM certifications
• Shift Digital Vigs
• DMS Pulls (there can be many different ones just for a single DMS vendor)
• DMS Pushes for deals
• DMS Pushes for service
• CRM integrations
• Chat tool integrations
• Book Value integrations
• Trade-valuation tools
• Telephony
• SMS + texting with media (yes, they're two different things)
• Email blasts
• Email 1 to 1's
• Full credit pulls
• Soft credit pulls
• Just to name a few I have worked on

Not to mention the other pieces that people don't consider or give enough time to develop:

1. Analytics
2. Security
3. Choosing the right database to license
4. Hosting (although AWS sure makes that easy)