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"Get your ePrice" for new car inventory?

I’ve been reading this discussion with a lot of interest. There is one thing that matters most to a dealer at the end of the day; bottom line! I need our BDC making appointments and traffic on the floor and phone. To get more traffic I ask myself all the time, “do we price on the internet”, “do we price part of our inventory”, or “do I keep using the “Get ePrice””?? (I can hear Alex now, “damnit Eley start pricing”)

Within 30 mile radius of me there 12 Chevy stores that range from selling 10 to 80 per month. Only 2 stores are pricing online. One very aggressive into invoice and below invoice before rebates and destination!! The other is holding gross with their pricing. And the rest use MSRP, in shopping; 2 dealers will not give a “best price” unless you come into the dealership, what would some say on here….. #FAIL!

As Uncle Joe will tell you – people in general want to negotiate! But, then again, if you are pricing right and building the value as to “why buy from me and my dealership” you can hold better gross and you will.

We do not price our new vehicles but use the MSRP and the “Get ePrice”. Once we get a lead, we then give the price upfront; I got their information and I can then market to them! (SIDE BAR to Alex, I wish dealer.com could allow you to price vehicles individually instead of the same structure across the board. Such as if I want to have a sale on all my Cruze’s and price all those but nothing else in Chevy. Or I want to sale price all my 2011 inventory when I start to build up my 2012’s??)

We have been live with dealer.com for 60 days now (this is no plug for dealer.com, but maybe it is) and I have seen a great change in our leads! Using the MSRP and the “Get ePrice” I plan to stick with it for a while to see how it goes. Before we were with Cobalt and we still have that site off to the side. We have seen a great change in our leads, much better leads and for the first time a significant spike in used leads (almost non-existent with Cobalt). So honestly I see no reason after 60 days to change anything when we are getting traffic, which is +49.9% of dealer benchmark for dealer.com, and we have seen a significant improvement in our appointments and closings. So before you jump into price, you might want to look at other factors!

I guess the question still is, to price or not to price. So far there are a lot of great opinions about price, but I think you have to look very closely at what you’re doing, what your competition is doing, and make that decision based on testing the waters as to what would work best for your store.

I would like to see more discussion on this, and more people give their input and a show of hands who is pricing new and who is only showing MSRP! If you are pricing, what changes has it made to your traffic, time on site, and leads! Did you leads go up, down, stay the same, are you seeing better leads, more floor traffic etc.
 
Eley,

I am a used guy, so don't laugh ;-)... but isn't this a new day for GM and all GM dealers? Is NEW Chevy inventory turning quickly and not so easy to get (as it once was)?

If so,
then it's a SELLERS MARKET and all past practices are now old and cold.

And, If so, I vote for "get your ePrice"
 
We use MSRP and a "Get a Quote" button...Works great for us. We use ADP's Quotes Online tool which lets us deploy the product on all of our website no extra charge. Even on our mobile site. We get a lot of leads and they close a pretty high rate.

We did a lot of A/B testing on the verbage and location of the buttons as well as the email templates and feel that once you get the right solution for your market it can be a valuable tool. I have found no push back for not having prices on all the inventory and in fact a lot of positive feed back on the tool we are using. As an added note, there is several different ways to setup the QOL tool...we choose to send the customer an emal with the quote. The email will give them the quote but give them a link to a custom page on our website that will allow them to customize the quote. ie: adding a trade, correct the estimated taxes, make an offer and apply for financing.


Maybe not for everyone but in our case it helps us move the customer forward and at the end of the day has a very strong ROI.
 
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Greetings all! I suggest taking the time to read Whitepaper #03 at Zag.com, "The Case for Upfront Pricing". Whitepaper #01 "Lead generation is broken for dealers and customers." is quite interesting as well. Though I know that there can be some bias here as ZAG/Truecar wants to sell their solutions, I came away believing that their points of view had alot of merit. Would be interested in hearing someone elses take on the ideas put forth in these publicatios.
Best,
Tim Alvoid
 
(SIDE BAR to Alex, I wish dealer.com could allow you to price vehicles individually instead of the same structure across the board. Such as if I want to have a sale on all my Cruze’s and price all those but nothing else in Chevy. Or I want to sale price all my 2011 inventory when I start to build up my 2012’s??)

You can ;)

In the interest of keeping this thread on topic let's move that conversation offline. And in the continued interest of keeping this thread on topic, Joe makes a great point. When demand is high and supply is low, hold gross!
 
We just started pricing our new cars (Excluding Camaro/Cruze/Equinox) with rebates and some dealer discount online... Has been driving in a few more leads so far and actually drove in a couple people ready to buy at that price. Happy with the results so far.

There is still also a button though that says "Get Internet Price" and the (Camaro/Cruze/Equinox) tell you to "Get Internet Price" only showing MSRP.
 
You can ;)

In the interest of keeping this thread on topic let's move that conversation offline. And in the continued interest of keeping this thread on topic, Joe makes a great point. When demand is high and supply is low, hold gross!

Hold gross for sure... but still deliver cars... holding an extra $500 is awesome but not when you lose the entire $2,000 over it.

Even with tight inventory you cannot fall in love with cars... you have to get them off the lot.
 
I could go on and on about this but I'll keep it simple.

Before anything, know your market.

What I have closely observed at my Nissan Dealer. Allow me to set this up:

Dealer is located right outside a very competitive metropolitan area.
We Do provide New Car up Front Pricing online. Lead capture rate on the dealers website stays constant in ratio (avg 7%) to online traffic.

Our online pricing drives floor traffic, hands down. Not saying its the pricing alone that drives our floor traffic. We do other things but this is the major driver.

This dealer has increased sales by 130% over the last year.