I'm going to be the guy that rains on the parade Jason. I promise I'm not posting to be negative, that's not my bag. I really think you need to know the answers to these questions BEFORE you start looking for inventory because I think you have a sheer cliff of an uphill battle ahead of you.
- What is my USP (unique selling proposition or "big idea")? What differentiates my marketplace from all of the others?
- Why will consumers choose to shop on my marketplace over other well-known ones?
- Why will consumers use my marketplace instead of a dealer's site to search for inventory?
- Why will dealers choose to advertise with me instead of other well-known marketplaces? What can I alone offer them?
- I think you really need to assume that there isn't more pie, you will be asking dealers to divert spend TO you and AWAY from something else.
- How will I get traffic to my marketplace? What advertising will I deploy?
- How will I ensure that the traffic I drive converts?
- Does my "big idea" need to be its own marketplace, or can I deliver it to dealers in another way?
I work for one of the largest inventory aggregators in the industry. I get requests almost weekly from folks that are looking for dealer's inventory feeds to populate their new marketplaces. It has been a while, but Refresh has seen similar threads here too.
I don't want to discourage you if you have a great idea or a fresh new concept and you've done your homework, but I honestly believe that unless you have a tight niche (3-pedal) or a loyal following and a huge platform like Doug Demuro (carsandbids), this is going to be a tough business to hop into at this time.
Just search the forums and see how many dealers have pulled all of their 3rd party lead budget and reallocated it to search/social. The folks at CARS, Gurus, CARFAX, EDMUNDS, TrueCar, Autotrader, CarsForSale, CarStory and all of the properties we whitelabel (my company has built 240+ marketplaces in our 16 year history)... that isn't anywhere close to an exhaustive list and I left out what I think is probably you're biggest competitor for dealer's mindshare, the dealer's website itself. All of these have a big headstart on UI, branding, conversion, consumer experience, lead delivery, ROI justification, dealer support, technical support, reporting, etc...
This is a highly competitive space my friend. Again, not trying to be Debbie Downer, but I'd hate to see you spend a lot of cycles building a marketplace that you could have spent on an "easier" path to market if your idea isn't marketplace dependent.
Ryan
PS. Welcome to the Forum!
