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Websites made by a company that doesn't specialize in dealerships?

Spencer Tichenor

Green Pea
May 21, 2014
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First Name
Spencer
Has anyone tried skipping all these vendors that specialize in dealership websites and going straight to regular webdev company all kinds of sites?

It seems to me that most of these dealership web companies just whip you up a shitty website, then charge you $500-$2000 a month for basically nothing. And it blows me away how ugly most of these websites are that the vendors make. You'd think that if it was the only kind of website you make, and you use basically the same template for every dealership you work with, that your websites would be top notch.

Given that these website vendors are giving every dealer basically the same site, and it only costs about $50 a month to host a website, what exactly are we paying them all that money for?

I understand that with most web development companies, usually you pay a big fee up front to have the site designed, then a small monthly payment after that just to cover to cost of keeping the site up and the occasional update. I don't know what these dealership are charging you $1000+ a month for.

The one benefit I can see from choosing one of these dealership vendors instead of a regular web developer is that you can see exactly what you're going to get before you get it. Choosing a company that has never made a website for a dealership could be more risky if it turns out they don't know what they're doing. The only problem is, in all my searching, I've only found one dealership vendor who's making websites that are up to my standards.
 
Hi Spencer, I would definitly go for a unique design to help you stand out of the crowd. We see to often ford=bleu, kia=red on shitty templates … go get a custom one by a regular webdev company, I don’t really think it’s risky if they have web expertise.
-alex
 
Probably not the opinion you're looking for, but I can give you a bit more insight from our end of things.
First, a brief context - the site we offer are all built on the same platform. This platform has nothing templated except the dashboard, but it's fairly automotive-specific in the sense that many of the function and "blocks" we've developed are all built around inventory and other dealership-specific things. We offer websites that fall into the price category you've stated so I may be able to shed a bit of light on the situation.

Given that these website vendors are giving every dealer basically the same site, and it only costs about $50 a month to host a website, what exactly are we paying them all that money for?
This is the only place we really deviate from what you initially explained. We custom-tailor a design from scratch for each client unless they specifically request a theme someone else has. That's only a difference in the initial setup though, so shouldn't affect the rest of the question.

When it comes to Automotive websites, there are a few extra costs involved in the process. It's not $1000 worth of costs obviously, but it's more than just hosting.

Hosting - anywhere from $5 a month to $65 a month depending on traffic numbers. This cost is doubled because we would setup a redundant copy of the site that clones everything in the event of any downtime we have a full-failover as opposed to just a static failover that mimics the site.
DMS Integration - most DMS integration for vendors is done through a third party like HomeNet (especially if the client is using a Reynolds system) and there's a per-rooftop cost for this as well.
VIN Decoding - everyone has different costs for this depending on how much data you ask for, but we pay per website for this data.
Inventory Photos - believe it or not, we're still paying per website for all stock photos for new and Used Inventory. This includes exterior and interior shots and is not as cheap as you would think.
Inventory Videos - we integrate with a video provider so the platform automatically generates a video for any vehicle with 5 or more photos. It was requested by many clients so it's there, but we pay to resell this service.
Backups - Personal storage for backing up your home is cheap, but corporate backup is a whole different ballgame. I need servers that can handle high network speeds and hard drive write speeds so I can backup an entire website in a short period of time in order to not tax the server for longer than a few moments.
Custom Requests / Support - this may not apply to all vendors, but a significant portion of our costs ends up being support hours. Some custom work falls into a paid category, but items that may help all clients or platform enhancements get rolled into the monthly fee and I haven't had a single month go by yet where we haven't rolled out dashboard enhancements, new widget options, SEO updates or new utilities for the clients to manage their inventory.
Reporting - as much as this seems automated, there is still some human consolidation required for good reports. Depending on what reports you're getting, this can take over an hour per website.

Anything above and beyond this is usually charged out as a separate package, but these are the core costs on our end.
I wish a $750 website charge made us $740 in profit, but it simply doesn't add up that way when all of OUR vendors are charging us as well. That said, there's certainly profits in the price because our business model is entirely different than that of a website development studio. As a matter of fact, we've been discussing offering our platform under that pricing model as well because we're not opposed to it. The issue I have with that pricing model is that I have to charge the client for each upgrade to the platform or bundle a certain number of them every so often. As mentioned before, we update the platform every week - sometimes it's security or SEO changes I would consider mission critical.

I won't get into the value of a company that knows the automotive industry beyond mentioning that we have twice now tried to make a website that did not adhere to standard automotive website practices, deviated entirely from the herd and made it eCommerced based, retail centric or some other strategy. While all other sites switching from X to the new platform see a minimum 40% increase in organic traffic over 3 months, both of these sites saw between -20% and -30%. It's not a perfect science by any means, but the automotive-specific website themes we developed perform well above and beyond the generic or retail-centric ones we have tried.

Long story short, there are more than standard costs associated with a dealership's website.
If you want to do it on the cheap, use Wordpress with an Inventory plugin and a solid theme. You won't lose as bad on the SEO front and you'll save a fortune. Just make sure your website provider understands inventory integration and lead submissions. Also, don't pay $20,000 for a website you could have paid $1000 a month for - you'll have to redevelop at least a portion within 20 months or you'll fall behind the curve and then your cost will continually stay above that of a provider.
 
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...Given that these website vendors are giving every dealer basically the same site, and it only costs about $50 a month to host a website, what exactly are we paying them all that money for?

... I don't know what these dealership are charging you $1000+ a month for.

.... The only problem is, in all my searching, I've only found one dealership vendor who's making websites that are up to my standards.

Spencer,

Your long on opinion and short on insights. This is a very old topic here on the forums. Search for "DIY" and you'll find a lot more info on this topic.
 
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Joe, you're long in the tooth and short on wits. Please don't post flamebait in my thread.

Craigh, thanks for the insightful response. So you integrate the website with the DMS, eh? Currently, our DMS and our site are completely separate entities. Is the purpose of integration to draw the vehicle inventory from the DMS? Right now, we use AutoUplinkUSA to manage our inventory across the internet. Am I correct in saying that AutoUpLinkUSA covers the costs of VIN decoding, inventory photos, inventory videos, and DMS integration?
 
Craigh, thanks for the insightful response. So you integrate the website with the DMS, eh? Currently, our DMS and our site are completely separate entities. Is the purpose of integration to draw the vehicle inventory from the DMS? Right now, we use AutoUplinkUSA to manage our inventory across the internet. Am I correct in saying that AutoUpLinkUSA covers the costs of VIN decoding, inventory photos, inventory videos, and DMS integration?

Spencer,

We integrate with the DMS for inventory feeds. We also integrate with other third-party companies that do things like pricing and other specific datasets. We write a custom rule for each rooftop that combines their various feeds in the priority they choose (ie: sometimes they want vAuto prices to overwrite ERA prices, sometimes they want ERA prices to overwrite AutoTrader prices).

I don't know much about AutoUpLinkUSA - I imagine they cover most of the workload though as an intermediary. There would still be integration on the website vendor's end to integrate with AutoUpLink, but it would be less than having to integrate with 6 feeds like I do for some rooftops :)

I don't know if they decode VINs though - almost 100% of the time this happens at the vendor level. It's too much data to pass around in a feed from one place to another. They probably don't do videos either and may not do stock photos - I'm not familiar enough to say at this point.

Hope that helps - any other questions don't hesitate to ask and I'll do my best to clarify and hopefully it helps you to, at the very least, make a list of what matters when you head for a vendor or custom studio.
 
Spencer,

Your long on opinion and short on insights. This is a very old topic here on the forums. Search for "DIY" and you'll find a lot more info on this topic.

Joe, this isn't the most helpful advice I've seen. I understand your angle here, but you should try searching for "DIY" before recommending to others.

  1. The following words are either very common, too long, or too short and were not included in your search:
    DIY
 
One overlooked item is that typically traditional web development companies have shelf lives. They are one of the simplest businesses to start but a lot harder to stay in business and most fail (and I'm talking within a year or two). The ones that don't fail found a niche to specialize in.

There's some pro's to hiring a team outside of autos, but the cons IMO far outweigh them. Support and reliability are crucial for your store and that's really what you're paying for with the dealer website vendors.
 
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One overlooked item is that typically traditional web development companies have shelf lives. They are one of the simplest businesses to start but a lot harder to stay in business and most fail (and I'm talking within a year or two). The ones that don't fail found a niche to specialize in.

There's some pro's to hiring a team outside of autos, but the cons IMO far outweigh them. Support and reliability are crucial for your store and that's really what you're paying for with the dealer website vendors.

I came from a development company any left to join this "niche" automotive development studio, but we now offer all manner of development services. It's true though - many development studios simply fail.