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Searching for a new website provider

ajholland

Boss
Nov 29, 2009
172
12
First Name
Aaron
I took over about 2 months ago as the Internet Director for a 5 rooftop dealership group. We are currently using Cobalt as our website provider for all of our stores, but I am researching a few webite providers-here are the companies I am looking into, any feedback would be greatly appreciated!

-Dealer.com
-Dealerskins
-Dealeron
-Dealerfire
-TK Carsites
-BZ
 
From my experience everyone has dealer.com so it may be generic. That being said, everyone has dealer.com so they must be doing something right. ;)

We had dealerskins in our dealership 3 years ago and the GMs and owner hated it. Not exactly sure why.

We used Ecarlist as a website creator for the past year or two. The website was excellently designed, but tech support took forever. Trying to put up a weekend sale, forget about it unless you give them a two week notice.

Currently we're using Izmocars. Their tech support is in India but are very knowledgeable and good at design. Depends on if you can deal with that or not. They are building a new platform called "Indy" that will be released next month to current customers. I got a demo of it and it blew me away. It lets the customer basically change anything about the website. (I was skeptical as a computer guy when people promise stuff like that, but it's a spectacular web designing tool for laymen)

So Pros for Izmo: great designs, great SEO (Cobalt and Izmo have the two best SEO I've seen), vehicle selector is slick, back-end tool allows you to add specials instantly in numerous formats, new back-end tool will allow full website control and change.
Cons for Izmo: tech support is in India but working on Pacific time zone. Everything must be done by the book so nothing can be rushed. (both good and bad).
 
aj,

What are your goals?
Joe,
I don't have a complaint about the SEO from Cobalt, I just feel like our site could be performing much better from a lead standpoint. I don't believe people stay on our site long and the page views are relatively low. I live in a central Illinois, and really no one else has a really nice website so there is a huge opportunity for us to set our group apart. Goals:

SEO
Attractive and Engaging
Easy to manage/good backend tool

I spent two years at Autotrader.com so some of this is learn on the go for me, so all suggestions are greatly appreciated!
 
IMO, 1st find out how you're doing now relative to your peers. See this thread:

http://forum.dealerrefresh.com/f43/...rt-staff-leads-case-study-2-months-505-2.html

See their traffic and sales performance numbers, then GET YOURS! Example:

September
Uniques: 2995
Leads: 109
Conversion: 3.6%
Sales: 18
Closing: 16.5%

October
Uniques: 2956
Leads: 103
Conversion: 3.5%
Sales: 10
Closing: 9.7%

What are your stats? Call Cobalt and ask for the number of Unique visitors to your site by month.