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Uncle Joe's Makeover Diary 2.0

joe.pistell

Uncle Joe
Apr 7, 2009
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@Alex Snyder how do you feel about the Capital One button cannibalizing leads from your FRIKINTech thingy? ;)

COMMUNISTS!​

:lmao:Joe

@Ryan Everson, I think Capital One is hiding from its competition and using boots on the street + this product to enable it. As a business practice, it is smart on their part, but it is a terrible consumer experience. It is anti-transparency all because they don't want to publish rates. Just another fancy lead form that bleeds dealership website visitors away from the dealership. Too many dealers have fallen for this without regarding the customer experience.

I think dealers should choose an obvious online path for the customer that does not conflict with what they will experience in the showroom. FRIKINtech goes through a lot of effort to make sure payments a customer sees are repeatable by sales managers, regardless of who the lender is (we have access to over 1,400 lenders, by the way).

When it comes to Capital One, I don't lose any sleep over them. Where FRIKINtech is headed is a vastly different direction than competing over real estate on a dealer's website. Our website component is a bonus for dealers on top of all the ways we can engage their shoppers now! Things have changed in the last two years ;)
 

✨ AI Highlights

Joe Pistell, former Cars.com head of marketplace, returns to automotive digital retail strategy work and shares experimental ideas on vehicle merchandising, including AI-generated detailer imagery, richer safety feature data from build sheets (revealing hundreds of naming variants per feature), and mobile-first VDP design. The thread draws comparisons to Carvana and CarMax, with Pistell arguing their tightly integrated ops-and-engineering feedback loops allow them to iterate far faster than fragmented dealer website vendors, making sales productivity — not lead volume — the true measure of a great dealership website.

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