I recently posted this graph in another thread.
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This emphasizes the importance of good reviews. With DealerRater, Yelp, Google, Insider Pages, just to name a few, it is going to be very difficult to look good without being good.
On AutoTrader, you can select a review site that you want displayed on your VDP. Cars.com has its own reviews. I was looking at a few of the local Nissan dealerships, in the area, on Cars.com. I sorted the dealerships by model and price. As I clicked through the dealerships with some of the lowest prices, I noticed many of them had really low scores. I started reading some of these and wondered if the dealerships did. One after another said "don't believe the internet price". Then I noticed one with a really good score and a lot of reviews. I started reading them and noticed that they had twenty five reviews on Cars.com that were service related. I thought that it was odd for customers to go to Cars.com to review a dealerships service department. I looked at their reviews on other sites and couldn't find nearly that number of service reviews. Looking back at the reviews, for this dealer, on Cars.com, I noticed the dates of these service reviews: 14 of them on March 30, 5 on March 31 and another 6 on April 1st. Once you get past the 25 suspect service reviews, you see the four sales related reviews that are all bad. Without the service reviews this store would have a 1 rating out of a possible 5.
I am and have always been a fan of Cars.com. I think that if they are going to have their own reviews, better oversight might be in order.
