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I know the product better than Tech Support... It's a problem.

May be the result of dealers wanting to pay $700-800 for a website that companies can't afford to hire support with technical degrees, technical knowledge, or flat out, that give a rats ass for the little money they get paid.

Yes. $700-$800 monthly fee is better associated with a product than a service. That's what ultimately it has become - a standard issued site sold to your same competitors and you get to edit the variables.

Can't believe they didn't know what MSRP was. Anybody who has gone shopping should know what MSRP is!!!
 
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Yes. $700-$800 monthly fee is better associated with a product than a service. That's what ultimately it has become - a standard issued site sold to your same competitors and you get to edit the variables.

Can't believe they didn't know what MSRP was. Anybody who has gone shopping should know what MSRP is!!!


You can buy a site that is not standard BUT dealers want to pay standard price. I deal with that every day.
 
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It is amazing how often I work with dealers with websites that, for example, are not adaptive/responsive. We can see their mobile performance down the drain, an in the end, the are not willing to pay a penny more than what pay for their older system.

This encourages a business to invest on developing only what is absolutely necessary to gain the account and not o have everything the business needs to have.
 
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Joe G of Dealere and I talked about this very problem at Pasch's DMSC in Napa a few weeks back. We're watching an dealer operations evolution where a growing segment of smart dealers are employing far smarter people to manage their site. These new players will ALWAYS be smarter than the rank and file vendor support ppl. IMO, the best solution is to modify the enterprise CMS architecture to allow these new players access under the hood. This way, they're less dependent on support... period. Logically, the level of support these new players need is way up the food chain ;-).
 
Joe G of Dealere and I talked about this very problem at Pasch's DMSC in Napa a few weeks back. We're watching an dealer operations evolution where a growing segment of smart dealers are employing far smarter people to manage their site. These new players will ALWAYS be smarter than the rank and file vendor support ppl. IMO, the best solution is to modify the enterprise CMS architecture to allow these new players access under the hood. This way, they're less dependent on support... period. Logically, the level of support these new players need is way up the food chain ;-).

Joe, I used to work for Dealere when they first started. From my experience there, I had the same thing in mind and developed a platform to do this (like a Shopify for dealer sites) - but the problem I found is in the numbers. There's not a large enough market of new players to build and support something like this - let alone pay for it. Most of the new players will have developers that want to use their own tools to build the site with. The new players I feel will also not be comfortable paying for a platform that takes money away from their own pockets. There's also liability issues as well. So I scrapped the project. I think there will be a day when something like this has a large enough market to pursue.

What do you think a dealer's website is worth to them?
 
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Joe, I used to work for Dealere when they first started. From my experience there, I had the same thing in mind and developed a platform to do this - but the problem I found is in the numbers. There's not a large enough market of new players to build and support something like this - let alone pay for it. Most of the new players will have developers that want to use their own tools to build the site with. The new players I feel will also not be comfortable paying for a platform that takes money away from their own pockets. So I scrapped the project. I think there will be a day when something like this has a large enough market to pursue.

What do you think a dealer's website is worth to them?

I work with DE and I can tell you that we have some amazing back end tools that no one, nobody, nadie, uses.

One example that amazes me:

We have integrated with the backend: phone calls (listen to them), chats, credit apps, emails, Google analytics, Google adwords, crags list, and a few other things (internal reporting such as conversion rate, etc) and when I monitor the system I see less than 10% of the dealers access the system. That tells me that they either log in 8 different systems to get this information or that they don't look at this information at all (I bet for the later).
 
I work with DE and I can tell you that we have some amazing back end tools that no one, nobody, nadie, uses.

One example that amazes me:

We have integrated with the backend: phone calls (listen to them), chats, credit apps, emails, Google analytics, Google adwords, crags list, and a few other things (internal reporting such as conversion rate, etc) and when I monitor the system I see less than 10% of the dealers access the system. That tells me that they either log in 8 different systems to get this information or that they don't look at this information at all (I bet for the later).

I would say the latter, yes. That's part of the problem - you can build an advanced platform where everything is editable - but most won't touch it. It's only the ones far ahead of the curve (those 10%) that will continue to look for advantages and in most cases those people are in-house employees.
 
I would say the latter, yes. That's part of the problem - you can build an advanced platform where everything is editable - but most won't touch it. It's only the ones far ahead of the curve (those 10%) that will continue to look for advantages and in most cases those people are in-house employees.

Chris,

Editable? I'm talking just looking at the numbers. Editing is at 0.1% at best. You are far off at 10%
 
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