Dealership Deception

[Ryan Everson]

A new website vendor entrant also runs the risk of more OEMs following Audi’s lead - eliminating dealer choice by building in-house website platforms that all Tier 3 dealers are required to use.

Many OEMs tried to use EV programs to drive this shift. Now, CDPs and the push for “unified customer experiences” may be the next reasons they continue down that same path.

 

[DjSec]

A new website vendor entrant also runs the risk of more OEMs following Audi’s lead - eliminating dealer choice by building in-house website platforms that all Tier 3 dealers are required to use.

Many OEMs tried to use EV programs to drive this shift. Now, CDPs and the push for “unified customer experiences” may be the next reasons they continue down that same path.

Yes, that is an awesome point and one I didn't think about!

And the perfect play for the OEM’s!

They need the dealership data and by forcing the dealerships into their platforms they get all the data, allowing them to go directly to the customer when they are ready to by pass the dealership, and use all the dealerships tried and tested marketing.

So the OEM doesn’t have to spend money testing landing pages, keywords, or any of that stuff because the dealerships have already spent the money and done the testing.

And the billions of dollars dealerships are spending on 3rd party services come back to the OEM’s!

 

[Ryan Everson]

So the problem is even bigger than I described it. I focused on the challenge of getting dealerships and OEMs to let you in the door, but it sounds like there's an additional hurdle with third-party providers that are already embedded in the system.

However if someone was trying to get their foot in the door it sounds like rather than selling directly to individual dealerships, it would be more effective to target dealer groups first?

Or do you still need buy-in from both?

Back in the day, it wasn’t uncommon for a dealership to run two websites - one with the OEM-mandated vendor, and another with a preferred (but non-approved) provider.

Today, that setup is nearly impossible. Most OEMs have tightened their rules around digital advertising and co-op eligibility, making dual-site strategies unworkable. The good news is that many OEMs have expanded their approved website vendor lists - from just one option to now three to six in many cases.

All of this makes entering the space incredibly challenging for new website vendors. The opportunity pool is small, margins are thin, and the dealer client base is often high-maintenance and quick to switch. On the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got used car dealers who are perfectly happy with a $99/month CarsForSale site. And the handful of independents with the budget for something more are already being pursued by strong competitors like Overfuel.

Not to mention, there’s always the looming risk of OEMs going in the opposite direction like I mentioned in my previous post - ditching website choice programs altogether and building out their own in-house website platforms.

Caveat emptor.

 

[DjSec]

Back in the day, it wasn’t uncommon for a dealership to run two websites - one with the OEM-mandated vendor, and another with a preferred (but non-approved) provider.

Today, that setup is nearly impossible. Most OEMs have tightened their rules around digital advertising and co-op eligibility, making dual-site strategies unworkable. The good news is that many OEMs have expanded their approved website vendor lists - from just one option to now three to six in many cases.

The only reason to prevent dealerships from going outside the pr-approved vendor list would be control, in my humble opinion and even if they give you a choice of 100, if all the software is outdated and none of them meet the performance guidelines set up by Google, does it really matter?

All of this makes entering the space incredibly challenging for new website vendors. The opportunity pool is small, margins are thin, and the dealer client base is often high-maintenance and quick to switch.

Yes, I agree on the one hand it would cost you millions and on the other hand it wouldn't be worth it because at any moment they could decide to go in-house with everything!

Dealerships are in trouble and if the OEM's get to hurting they can force inventory onto the dealerships and the dealerships onto their own platforms and if its too much for the dealership and they go out of business there are less people to fight them going direct to consumer!

On the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got used car dealers who are perfectly happy with a $99/month CarsForSale site.

Hard to beat the price, however your giving someone else total control over your business!

Third‐party websites have become extremely influential in the used car market. and their “control” isn’t about owning the cars or setting prices, but rather about shaping how buyers and sellers interact and how information is shared.

They are the:

• Information Gatekeepers: These platforms aggregate listings, vehicle histories, pricing data, and consumer reviews. As many as 80–90% of used car buyers begin their search online, so the way these websites present information can greatly influence consumer decisions.
• Price Benchmarking: Tools that compare prices or offer “fair market value” estimates (as seen on sites like CarGurus or Edmunds) help set expectations and can indirectly affect negotiations between buyers and sellers.
• Transparency and Trust: By providing detailed vehicle histories (CarFax) and comprehensive reviews, these sites have built significant trust. Their data-driven insights are now often the reference point for both consumers and dealers.

If OEM's let them start selling new cars it could be the end of the dealerships as we know them!

However trying to compete with established used car platforms like AutoTrader, Cars.com, CarGurus, Edmunds, and CarFax would be a significant challenge due to their entrenched market positions, high traffic, and brand recognition.

And the handful of independents with the budget for something more are already being pursued by strong competitors like Overfuel.

And Overfuel's website suffer from the same performance issues, coding probblems, and compliance issues as all the others.

 

[Ryan Everson]

The only reason to prevent dealerships from going outside the pr-approved vendor list would be control, in my humble opinion and even if they give you a choice of 100, if all the software is outdated and none of them meet the performance guidelines set up by Google, does it really matter?

Yes, I agree on the one hand it would cost you millions and on the other hand it wouldn't be worth it because at any moment they could decide to go in-house with everything!

Dealerships are in trouble and if the OEM's get to hurting they can force inventory onto the dealerships and the dealerships onto their own platforms and if its too much for the dealership and they go out of business there are less people to fight them going direct to consumer!


Hard to beat the price, however your giving someone else total control over your business!

Third‐party websites have become extremely influential in the used car market. and their “control” isn’t about owning the cars or setting prices, but rather about shaping how buyers and sellers interact and how information is shared.

They are the:

• Information Gatekeepers: These platforms aggregate listings, vehicle histories, pricing data, and consumer reviews. As many as 80–90% of used car buyers begin their search online, so the way these websites present information can greatly influence consumer decisions.
• Price Benchmarking: Tools that compare prices or offer “fair market value” estimates (as seen on sites like CarGurus or Edmunds) help set expectations and can indirectly affect negotiations between buyers and sellers.
• Transparency and Trust: By providing detailed vehicle histories (CarFax) and comprehensive reviews, these sites have built significant trust. Their data-driven insights are now often the reference point for both consumers and dealers.

If OEM's let them start selling new cars it could be the end of the dealerships as we know them!

However trying to compete with established used car platforms like AutoTrader, Cars.com, CarGurus, Edmunds, and CarFax would be a significant challenge due to their entrenched market positions, high traffic, and brand recognition.


And Overfuel's website suffer from the same performance issues, coding probblems, and compliance issues as all the others.

I’ve found it’s often more effective to lean in and make the most of the tools available, rather than waste energy pushing against the system and getting nowhere. You’re about 10 years too late for that fight - otherwise, I’d have been right there with you.

 

[DjSec]

I’ve found it’s often more effective to lean in and make the most of the tools available, rather than waste energy pushing against the system and getting nowhere. You’re about 10 years too late for that fight - otherwise, I’d have been right there with you.

Yes, I agree, I'm about 10 years to late for the fight for cars in the US but you still have motorcycles, lawnmowers, tractors, and bikes and you've still got 3rd world countries for example Colombia S.A has one car website (that does about 45 million a year), one bike website (that does a couple million a year) and no dedicated motorcycle websites for selling new and used motorcycles.

So you could build a motorcycle website that sold both new and used motorcycles as well as the parts to fix them and the accessories to make them look cool by teaming up with dealerships in Colombia.

It's not so much the fight is over as it is finding the right angle.

For example Bajaj isn't in the US but they are like the third largest motorcycle manufacturer in the world, if you built a dealership website with all the parts and motorcycles for Bajaj in it you might be able to sell it to some dealerships in other countries.

You get it to making money and the slowly enter the US market or you get it to making money and retire.

The idea would be to sell websites to dealerships to support and fine tune the main site that would be like AutoTrader, Cars.com, or CarGurus except for motorcycles in a 3rd world country like Colombia. I say Colombia S.A because my wife is Colombian, has family in Colombia and I'm currently sitting in Colombia watching it rain.

Please point out all the things I'm missing cause I'd rather not waste time with the thought if it has as many problems as the US car market.

 

[BillVaughnAlWestNissan]

Google's own studies show that at three seconds you lose 53% of your traffic.

This might seem like a stupid question and this isn't just an "Oh well...," but I hear this stat a lot and I wonder if ALL dealer sites suck and customers are used to dealers sites sucking, do dealer sites still lose 53% of their traffic because of this? I'm guessing it's a different number for dealers. It seems to me that very few dealers sites pass the CWV test. Then I looked at a site that DID pass it, but their performance score was still only 36.

 

[DjSec]

This might seem like a stupid question and this isn't just an "Oh well...," but I hear this stat a lot and I wonder if ALL dealer sites suck and customers are used to dealers sites sucking, do dealer sites still lose 53% of their traffic because of this? I'm guessing it's a different number for dealers. It seems to me that very few dealers sites pass the CWV test. Then I looked at a site that DID pass it, but their performance score was still only 36.

A lot of people fuss about dealership websites online and a lot of dealerships use 3rd party sites to get leads, instead of their own sites.

Koons.com (a dealership) decided to test it and when they speed up their site they saw a 800% increases in conversion within 2 weeks and in 60 days it jumped to a 1400% increase in conversion.

And that was only getting it just barely inside Google performance metrics at 2.5 seconds.

The team working on the speed problem promised to double conversions by speeding up the site but it was way more than double, they said it was like a 14x increase in conversions.

And that was nothing but speed!

They said at first they blamed Google and Facebook for bad leads but now they believe all the problems were because of website speed.

They saw improvements in rankings and conversions!

 

[DSmovingmetal]

Not at all

It seems like OEM's would wake up to the fact that they are hurting their own business and get out of the way!

I use Google Lighthouse for checking this stuff, after all it is about trying to rank on Google and it is there tool, so it just seems like this is would be the closes thing to what Google is using for ranking and while I would love to see some of your dealership websites I'd guess your own website would be the best example of what you build.

The First Content Paint has to be in under one second in order not to get a penalty, your is 2.5 seconds this is outside Google's performance guidelines.

In order NOT to get a ranking penalty your LCP has to be under 2.5 seconds, yours is at 5.1 seconds!

View attachment 9447

Everything in Red is where your own website fails, do you have examples of your dealerships that do not fail?

Google's own studies show that at three seconds you lose 53% of your traffic.

If ADA compliance is baked in then why do you use a third party add on to make it compliant?

Do accessibility overlays make a website compliant?

No!

Overlays give a false sense of security.

Accessibility issues with overlays.

An overlay gives the impression of fixing your site without actually fixing your site. You've still got bad code on your site but now it's hidden behind more options and more confusion.

And the reason for the law is to give everyone equal access to your services and products.

However, since this code is on a third party site and needs some type of input from the user to be activated ... the user is already not being treated the same as the people who access your site without a disability.

Creating a good web experience means fixing the code, validating it, and making it ADA compliant.

And even with the overlay your site isn't ADA compliant

And even with the overlay it is still not ADA compliant, it is missing form labels, has empty buttons, and 14 contrast errors, orphaned form labels, redundant links, and redundant title text.

View attachment 9448




The SEO can't work because of the load times.

The single most important thing when it comes to ranking a site is site speed and your website doesn't meet any of the performance standards that are setup by Google.

These standards (that your main company website doesn't pass) prevent and limit Google's ability to spider them and puts a ranking penalty on them coming out of the gate.


A dealership website is the center hub for all their marking, and just saying it doesn't this and that when you can't pass the standards on your own website seems a bit dishonest.


Exactly what I'm saying, if the web developers aren't able to build a website that at the very least meets the standards needed to prevent them from being sued, fined, and bleed users...they should look at building there own.

If I'm wrong then post some links to dealership websites that you've built that do everything you claim they do but if you read my article what you just tried to do is exactly what the article is talking about.

ADA Compliance - We bake it in but lawyers look for weakness and having an accessibility tool provides another layer of deterrence. Any good security system is layered with defense and this is ours against BS lawsuits. They can't give a false sense of security if you do the work under the hood but they let ambulance chasing lawyers find an easier target.

Performance - Our dealersync.com site is not built on our dealer platform and isn't built to the same standards as our dealer sites. Testing its performance and pointing out flaws is irrelevant. You'd want to look at our actual dealer sites since those are the ones optimized for performance. We put nearly every effort on SEO and optimization into our dealer platform as our primary method of acquiring new customers is word of mouth - as you'd see from our Google reviews. Way fewer dealerships Google for a new inventory management provider vs asking their friends in the industry.

SEO - load times are a factor and our dealer sites are really fast. It's not the only factor and never has been but we take it extremely seriously.

Pagespeed Insights - it isn't a serious test. You can run www.google.com and often get a horrible score back. Running a site that has a single image and 2 buttons and not getting a realistic score is one thing, but also consider it defaults to "slow 4G" which isn't what most dealerships are targeting for many reasons - the type of customer that might have that device, the trade-off in functionality and interactivity to lean out the site, and the decreased brand confidence when the site doesn't look as nice.

www.palmsautosales.com
www.kandsrides.com
www.ownacarfresno.com
www.lee-cars.com
www.belfordmotors.com

 

[DjSec]

ADA Compliance - We bake it in but lawyers look for weakness and having an accessibility tool provides another layer of deterrence. Any good security system is layered with defense and this is ours against BS lawsuits. They can't give a false sense of security if you do the work under the hood but they let ambulance chasing lawyers find an easier target.

Performance - Our dealersync.com site is not built on our dealer platform and isn't built to the same standards as our dealer sites. Testing its performance and pointing out flaws is irrelevant. You'd want to look at our actual dealer sites since those are the ones optimized for performance. We put nearly every effort on SEO and optimization into our dealer platform as our primary method of acquiring new customers is word of mouth - as you'd see from our Google reviews. Way fewer dealerships Google for a new inventory management provider vs asking their friends in the industry.

SEO - load times are a factor and our dealer sites are really fast. It's not the only factor and never has been but we take it extremely seriously.

Pagespeed Insights - it isn't a serious test. You can run www.google.com and often get a horrible score back. Running a site that has a single image and 2 buttons and not getting a realistic score is one thing, but also consider it defaults to "slow 4G" which isn't what most dealerships are targeting for many reasons - the type of customer that might have that device, the trade-off in functionality and interactivity to lean out the site, and the decreased brand confidence when the site doesn't look as nice.

www.palmsautosales.com
www.kandsrides.com
www.ownacarfresno.com
www.lee-cars.com
www.belfordmotors.com

Those site do not meet the performance standers set by Google and are not ADA compliant either.
www.palmsautosales.com



And the code has so many errors you can't even check it.



I can do them all but it takes a lot of time...so I'll just do Google lighthouse on the others



Some of those are hitting 13 second that should almost be a crime.

I put a site together here example.com - Experts in Django Development so you can see that it can be done, and it is not even optimized yet but it gets 100% has zero coding errors, and is ADA compliant by the code not by a 3rd party plugin. Fully optimized it will fully load in .5milliseconds.



No disrespect but your websites are hurting your customers and you should really care about that. You've got footer links back to your website and that bleeds link juice and is an off topic link.