• Stop being a LURKER - join our dealer community and get involved. Sign up and start a conversation.

Joe Pistell's new product

Vehicles have a numerical Status, a few of them are:
In-transit
In Stock
In Service
Deal Pending Sold

When a dealer sells a car, they change its status. The dealer has one of 2 systems that changes the status of the vehicle on the website. Manual or via DMS. Most all dealers are via DMS.

All dealers have a DMS vendor, all dealers have an inventory solution vendor. For those dealers that update status via DMS, The Inventory Solution vendor dials into the dealer's DMS and refreshes the inventory. Any change in status makes the vehicle on line or off line.

A vehicle in any status except 'In Stock' will no longer be online and will no longer send automatic emails.

Yes, I know all of that.. But what I'm saying is.. They get price alerts for 2-3 vehicles they saved. Only one vehicle gets removed (the sold one). They are still getting price alerts on the other 2 vehicles even though they already purchased one...

And for the opt-out issue.. Wouldn't that be a bad idea? Let's say next year they come back for another car, well now they opted out and won't be getting any price alert e-mails from the system.. Also I could see more people just marking it as spam rather than opt-ing out. Which might cause deliver-ability issues in the future..
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Tiny problem with this, just thinking... If the customer adds the vehicles in their shopping car. And then ends up buying the car. How will Dealer.com know to remove the car? Otherwise they'll keep getting price alerts on vehicles they don't want. I can see most consumers getting confused as to why the dealership is still sending them messages about older cars. At some point won't the consumer get frustrated or just mark those e-mails as SPAM. I just can't see the customer buying a car and going back to manually remove those vehicles.. Or remembering too.

You wrote about 2 different states.
#1) Alert on a sold unit in their shopping cart.
#2) Alerts when the shopper has bought elsewhere

Your follow up questions re: opt-out are missing a date reference. Should someone opt-in, it will over ride previous settings.
 
Last edited:
Joe,

I really like it. I think it's one of those tools that bridge the gap in the automobile industry. I have seen a stripped down version of this on the Drivetime.com website (only tracks vehicle's from the VDP page) and I have been wanting to add it on my site ever since I saw it.

If you are going to do a "phase 2" of this app I would:

1) Add SMS notification at the users request. (higher open rate) (Twilio has a great SMS api)

2) Add a "follow" like feature for showroom customer with a simple email and/or phone number opt-in. (like twitter)

I have subscribed one of my dealers on Mojomotors.com and the website is entirely based on "following" cars accompanied with a mailing list.

I often markdown some of my cars in my inventory based on the amount of people following them on Mojomotors.com because I know they will be receiving an email notification.(See below)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/7fichkf6jf1iqjp/Image 2013-02-24 at 10.02 PM.jpg

This is such a great tool, can you share usage data with us in the future?
 
Joe,

I really like it. I think it's one of those tools that bridge the gap in the automobile industry. I have seen a stripped down version of this on the Drivetime.com website (only tracks vehicle's from the VDP page) and I have been wanting to add it on my site ever since I saw it.

If you are going to do a "phase 2" of this app I would:

1) Add SMS notification at the users request. (higher open rate) (Twilio has a great SMS api)

2) Add a "follow" like feature for showroom customer with a simple email and/or phone number opt-in. (like twitter)

I have subscribed one of my dealers on Mojomotors.com and the website is entirely based on "following" cars accompanied with a mailing list.

I often markdown some of my cars in my inventory based on the amount of people following them on Mojomotors.com because I know they will be receiving an email notification.(See below)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/7fichkf6jf1iqjp/Image 2013-02-24 at 10.02 PM.jpg

This is such a great tool, can you share usage data with us in the future?

Hi John, glad you like it. You're seeing the tip of the ice berg, many enhancements like SMS notifications are "in the cue".

We all need to be super careful as the product matures and the topic morphs into "Usage data". I've said it here many times before, "dealers are like snow flakes, no two are alike", this specifically addresses 'site usage data'. IMO, usage data only matters against usage data from your store... cross store comparisions can easily lead to cash wasting decisions.

John, one reason I took on this position at Dealer.com (DDC) was it gave me a chance to work with ALL OF THE DATA to create new sales opportunities. DDC has critical data from its giant tool set including PPC advertising, Digital network advertising, visitor retargeting, all of the dealer website data, social and finally visibility into CRM. I will be leading the charge to bring it all together. I'll be calling in the brighest dealer in the industry to help us build computer models that SELL MORE CARS.

more as it comes....
 
Last edited: