• This thread is just the tip of the iceberg.The people ahead of the curve aren't Googling for answers — they're already in here, having the conversations you haven't found yet. DealerRefresh is free.Get the full picture →

Uncle Joe's Makeover Diary 2.0

No surprise, Carvana has it figured out. They continue to be way ahead of everyone else on vehicle merchandising.

Ryan,
100% agreed. Carvana and CarMax enjoy an incredibly tight loop of business operations and engineering, where the platform leaders have their instant feedback right from the sales floor, right from the call center. They have full visibility into internal KPIs and can iterate at light speed.

Our incredibly fragmented, isolated cube-dwelling web vendors are still trying to figure out how to generate more leads.


Garcia, the CEO of Carvana, is 10q's talks about sales productivity as the hallmark of a great website: call counts going down, time on call going down, all the while sales are increasing 40% year-over-year and our incredibly fragmented, isolated cube-dwelling web vendors are still trying to figure out how to generate more leads.
 

✨ AI Highlights

Joe Pistell, a well-known automotive digital marketing figure who recently departed Cars.com, returns to DealerRefresh to share experiments and strategy under a sequel to his original 'Makeover Diary' thread. He explores vehicle merchandising innovations — including AI-generated detailer imagery, feature taxonomy complexity across build sheets, and Carvana's lead in VDP merchandising — while lamenting the fragmented state of traditional dealer web vendors. A key insight is that Carvana's tight feedback loop between operations and engineering lets them iterate rapidly on sales productivity metrics, leaving traditional vendors still chasing basic lead generation.

Replies Views 253 86,159 Started Last Reply