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DealerOn is Off

I get being up front and demanding but DealerOn is a great company to work with, in my experience.

I don't think stamping your feet and demanding a refund is conducive to building a relationship with a partner who holds the keys to such a critical piece of our operations. To that end I think it's massively important to communicate with them over this but if you're willing to flippantly wage a stand off I think there's bigger problems at hand.

I don't think it's as systemic as Dealer.com which is why i'm particularly willing to stick my neck out on this.
Agreed.

This seems to be happening more regularly now with a multitude of website vendors which leads me to suggest constructive steps a dealer can take during such outages:

1) Use a tool like Site 24x7 to monitor your website and have it instantly notify you via text and email if it goes down.

2) When it goes down, first reach out to your website provider to make sure they are aware of the issue. It's possible it may not be a widespread system outage and only your website is affected.

3) Contact your paid search and social media ad providers to pause all ad spend. Even better, have a call-only ad campaign created and ready to turn on for instances like this.

4) Let your staff know that the website is down and provide an ETA if available. Also be sure to stress the fact that they can still view the inventory in the CRM, on third party listing sites, etc (some salespeople tend to think of reasons not to work).

5) Post on your dealership Facebook page that your website is down and offer an alternative option. A) Either call / visit us. OR B) Link to a third party listing site, this can be a slightly slippery slope though because then they may end up looking at competitor's inventory and your third party site could use the spike in traffic to try to justify a price increase.

6) If it begins to become a more regular occurrence with your vendor in particular, consider looking for a more reliable website partner if they are unable to provide steps they've taken to reduce the likelihood of it happening again.
I respectfully disagree. I'd ask for my money back for the downtime and light a match under the asses of all automotive website hosting companies. If that process catches on with dealers, then maybe, just maybe they'll come up with a fail safe / backup plan (which they don't want to spend the money on) and hopefully, it becomes standardized across that market. I get it's a rarity with DealerOn and if you dig, you'll find I've heavily supported their efforts and across many auto discussion sites.

Let's all wait for Dealer.com sites or another group to go down and say, "yeah, it's ok..." Where do the excuses end? Sorry, expectations should be much higher.
 
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an old-timey post for the crabby one, Alex Lau...

"...Joe, you used to be on the vendor side of the aisle, if there is one thing you can tell dealers about how to deal with vendors, what would that be?

I’ve been to Vegas at least 25 times, to SEMA, CES and NADA. I’ve worked both sides of the aisle, as a buyer and a seller. There is no one way I deal with all vendors. The most important vendors are the mission criticals with complex items and have a lot of promise in it. And even here there are no 2 alike. Lets look at 2 & compare my web builder HomeNet(HN) and my CRM provider ReyRey.

With HN, I take on a partner mentality. They committed to my big vision and they’re killing themselves to executing it to as close as I drew it up. Flowers of gratitude to Jesse B’s team, Matt, Tammy, Chris, Mike and more. They are effort-ing above and beyond the call of duty.

With ReyRey, go ahead and try to warm up to that vendor. NOT.
Hahaha… hey! No hate mail from your R&R troopers! Seriously, ReyRey’s CRM is mission critical, yet the reps can’t help you with the day to day issues. No partnering feel here, so, the sales guys get a lil’ bit o’ Junk Yard Dog from me. Yet (I’ve said it here before) ReyRey’s tech support is world class. All that being said, why does it take 400 hours to master R&R’s CRM platform? Can any dealer be using more than 5% of its potential… oh oh… I’m rambling again.

I’d say the most valuable tool in vendor relations is knowing which vendor can help you reach your goals, then make that vendor your partner. Sell that vendor your vision with a smile and back slapping enthusiasm and you’ll find above average service and someone who gives a sh*t about you, because you need them. And in the end, tell me, who doesn’t like to be needed?

@Alexander Lau, I penned that when you were ready to leave school and join the workforce. Drop the crabby Alex persona, it doesn't show the world the real you
 
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an old-timey post for the crabby one, Alex Lau...

"...Joe, you used to be on the vendor side of the aisle, if there is one thing you can tell dealers about how to deal with vendors, what would that be?

I’ve been to Vegas at least 25 times, to SEMA, CES and NADA. I’ve worked both sides of the aisle, as a buyer and a seller. There is no one way I deal with all vendors. The most important vendors are the mission criticals with complex items and have a lot of promise in it. And even here there are no 2 alike. Lets look at 2 & compare my web builder HomeNet(HN) and my CRM provider ReyRey.

With HN, I take on a partner mentality. They committed to my big vision and they’re killing themselves to executing it to as close as I drew it up. Flowers of gratitude to Jesse B’s team, Matt, Tammy, Chris, Mike and more. They are effort-ing above and beyond the call of duty.

With ReyRey, go ahead and try to warm up to that vendor. NOT.
Hahaha… hey! No hate mail from your R&R troopers! Seriously, ReyRey’s CRM is mission critical, yet the reps can’t help you with the day to day issues. No partnering feel here, so, the sales guys get a lil’ bit o’ Junk Yard Dog from me. Yet (I’ve said it here before) ReyRey’s tech support is world class. All that being said, why does it take 400 hours to master R&R’s CRM platform? Can any dealer be using more than 5% of its potential… oh oh… I’m rambling again.

I’d say the most valuable tool in vendor relations is knowing which vendor can help you reach your goals, then make that vendor your partner. Sell that vendor your vision with a smile and back slapping enthusiasm and you’ll find above average service and someone who gives a sh*t about you, because you need them. And in the end, tell me, who doesn’t like to be needed?

@Alexander Lau, I penned that when you were ready to leave school and join the workforce. Drop the crabby Alex persona, it doesn't show the world the real you
Keep your assumptions and accusations to yourself Joe, I graduated college in the early 90's. I just age well. I don't like a bunch of the things you write. That doesn't mean I call you out on it dude. Back to your self-promoting threads.
 
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I respectfully disagree. I'd ask for my money back for the downtime and light a match under the asses of all automotive website hosting companies. If that process catches on with dealers, then maybe, just maybe they'll come up with a fail safe / backup plan (which they don't want to spend the money on) and hopefully, it becomes standardized across that market. I get it's a rarity with DealerOn and if you dig, you'll find I've heavily supported their efforts and across many auto discussion sites.

Let's all wait for Dealer.com sites or another group to go down and say, "yeah, it's ok..." Where do the excuses end? Sorry, expectations should be much higher.

I think I understand what you're saying and at the risk of splitting hairs you changes your message from "give me or I quit" to high expectations which is aligned with what I would push towards.

I would never suggest letting anyone off the hook, ever, however, I'm a huge advocate of building partnerships and to trade that all in over downtime in a "give me or I quit" approach is immature and asinine.

@joe.pistell Great job delineating between the types of vendors/partners. I'd be hard-pressed to sign up with a website vendor and not want to work towards a picture of your old relationship with Homenet.

You get more bees with honey than pissing all over em with vinegar.
 
The great Geoffrey Moore once said, "if your an enterprise vendor, all your clients know you can't innovate, all they want from you is to Not Suck". #ReyRey, #Cox, #CDK

The little software guys are easy to fire. Alex L's right in that when the big dogs suck and nothing has changed, you gotta rant about it.

 
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I think I understand what you're saying and at the risk of splitting hairs you changes your message from "give me or I quit" to high expectations which is aligned with what I would push towards.

I would never suggest letting anyone off the hook, ever, however, I'm a huge advocate of building partnerships and to trade that all in over downtime in a "give me or I quit" approach is immature and asinine.

@joe.pistell Great job delineating between the types of vendors/partners. I'd be hard-pressed to sign up with a website vendor and not want to work towards a picture of your old relationship with Homenet.

You get more bees with honey than pissing all over em with vinegar.
I agree with most of that. However, and maybe I'm coming across incorrectly with blunt writing, I'd still ask for my money back. IMO, it's one of the few ways outside of threatening to quit that will make them react.

I worked at an automotive web platform provider. Although we liked to think so, we had no backup plan (it was waking up the lead development guy to reboot server, go back to a restore point, etc. at 3:15 AM). One of the few things that made us jump, threats of increased churn, which usually was generated out of our larger clients.

Truth is, I don't know how much DealerOn is charging these days, I'm out of the loop, but we we're a discount provider. We probably kept a great deal of clients because of that fact, even with the downtime issues. I know my boss would have done anything to keep many of our larger clients and that includes refunds. So...
 
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The great Geoffrey Moore once said, "if your an enterprise vendor, all your clients know you can't innovate, all they want from you is to Not Suck". #ReyRey, #Cox, #CDK

The little software guys are easy to fire. Alex L's right in that when the big dogs suck and nothing has changed, you gotta rant about it.


Warning: What you read here might hurt your trust level in some of your website vendors’ solutions.

https://www.dealerrefresh.com/trust-automotive-website-vendors/ from you @joe.pistell and good stuff at that.
 
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May be it's DealerON vendor that is the problem. I'm pretty sure DealerOn the size it is has a Disaster Recovery site... but their data center vendor is like we be back up in 45 mins. Then something like this goes on do I jump to DR site as the cost their in man hours to jump and back to normal is 40 hours. The DC is saying 45 min down time 30 mins have already passed lets wait it out for 15 mins. 15 mins not backup. Call Data Center get a new time line another 40 mins. Crap.. get new K for Disaster Jump... then Dave jumps in... all the feeds would need to be run... your data is going to be outdated by few hours, we will not have all the feeds as DR sync was 15 min delay... etc etc... Its only 40 mins before the DC is back up... we have been down hour already. Damage is done wait the 40 mins... and so it goes...