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The Top Vehicle Listings Websites - Who's NEXT?

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#83
Todd Caputo said:
Dealers should have a good enough website that they do not need to list their inventory on those websites. There are so many good vendors out there to help dealers with SEO/SEM and PPC I do not see a need for 3rd parties to make money off of our inventory. We no longer use the BIG GUYS and we have not missed a beat!
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Dealers will be spending more money on SEO and SEM of their sites but it's useless. Buyers care about the product - cars, and looking for one place that does job best in showing them all available options. Cars are no different than hotels, people go to booking.com not on every hotel's website.
 
#84
ispekhov said:
Dealers will be spending more money on SEO and SEM of their sites but it's useless. Buyers care about the product - cars, and looking for one place that does job best in showing them all available options. Cars are no different than hotels, people go to booking.com not on every hotel's website.
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Ilya,

I think that our comment is a little bit misplaced.

Agreed that customers care about site usability, but SEO and SEM are about making sure customers know that we have that usability in our sites.
 
#85
ispekhov said:
Dealers will be spending more money on SEO and SEM of their sites but it's useless. Buyers care about the product - cars, and looking for one place that does job best in showing them all available options. Cars are no different than hotels, people go to booking.com not on every hotel's website.
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I agree and then I don't agree. I think it is plain and simple, some people are going to find there way to autotrader/cars.com and to be quite honest it is hard to compete against these guys, they are going to show up in searches and have massive advertising budgets. So if your not on autotrader/cars.com you have little chance to sell that customer, you are not even in the game at that point. Yes of course you wan't an excellent site that drives traffic to itself and if you do that perfect then great, but there are people in your market going to these big dogs. The issue comes down to is it worth paying the money to them or can I invest it differently. It is something at our store we are having to think deeply about right now. We pay a lot of money to some of these big dogs and for us the only way to really to see what we can do with out them/less of them is to give it a shot.

On another note we are just starting up with Edmunds for the first time, and I'm very curious to see our results from them. They gave us their car code text tool in the package "free" anybodys thoughts on that? looks cool.
 
#87
Buyers care about the product - cars, and looking for one place that does job best in showing them all available options. Cars are no different than hotels, people go to booking.com not on every hotel's website.
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Partly true. Dealers aren't very comfortable with someone else doing the selling for them like the hotel/airline business. If dealers allowed Cars.com to sell their inventory directly to consumers then it's a different story. Completely different set of circumstances, though.
 
#88
Chris Cachor said:
...If dealers allowed Cars.com to sell their inventory directly to consumers then it's a different story. Completely different set of circumstances, though.
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Chris, thats like saying if Airlines allowed Orbitz to sell tickets...

IMO, if a cars.com VDP could deliver a dealer a deal via a shopping cart, Dealers would buy it all day long.
 
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#89
Shopping carts are 20 yrs old & they're easy to add to any website.

Currently, they don't want a cart experience, our Car Shoppers are ROBO*. Car shoppers WANT to go to the dealer to see, touch, smell, compare and decide (see GM's Shop-Click-Drive for proof). Remember ebay's attempt to punch into our vertical? That's more evidence of that car shoppers WANT to visit the dealer.

*ROBO = Research Online, Buy Off Line.
 
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#90
Wanted to share my 2 cents...

1. Dealer website awareness / Branding is necessary for any dealer. This is true regardless of your intent to post to 3rd party classifieds sites. The bigger your dealership / group, the more you need to spend on branding and direct traffic to your site.

2. Regardless of you size, you will need a 3rd party listing site. No matter how strong your brand (unless you are the ONLY dealer in town), an increasingly large percentage of car shoppers will want to take a look the general market outlook. They want to see what's out there. And quite a few new car purchases are impulse purchases, and these people want to know if their specific model requirements are available (RIGHT NOW that is). These people will want to cast a wide net. So eliminating 3rd party listing sites may work, and can even continue to keep you profitable in the short term. But you will be leaving some business on the table.

3. #2 is even more true for used cars. Very few people in this day and age shop for used cars by dealer lot. They shop for "Used Chevy Malibu with less than 60,000 miles", and not "let me check out the used inventory at dealer XYZ".

4. Absolutely agree with Joe Pistell above. Car shoppers will be "ROBO" at least into the foreseeable future. Would you buy a house using a shopping cart on Amazon? Ebay perhaps? A car is no different, and in many cases a lot more emotional than a house.

5. As for the question, "who's next". Watch out! I am working on it...:)
 
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