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Weekend Sales Event - Removing price from your wesbite

Jeff Kershner

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May 1, 2005
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Have you ever held one of those dealer "events" where you remove ALL pricing from your website for one week leading up to the event?


During this time, promoting of the event is blasted across several marketing channels.


Website leads are told that pricing can't be shared until the day of the event, come on in this weekend during the sale.


It's a tent event per say. These events are supposed to build curiosity, demand and urgency with the customer. The price is a huge secret because it's SOO LOW that it can't be revealed until the actual weekend of the sales event.


When done right, they can move some metal - during that particular time of the event. Some even include their own hired closers that work the event. They walk around the showroom floor overcoming objection over objection, getting customers in the finance box and driving away in a new car. I know. I've seen them in action. People still fall for these bs events all the time


But what's the long term effect here?

Does it slowly deteriorat any reputation you have?


By not having prices on the website - what happens to the other 90% consumers that don't convert into a lead? Do they consider this to be a game?


Do these events have any place in today's world of modern consumers?
 
Jeff - I do it from time to time. I haven't done a true A-B test on the results mostly because I didn't have the means to do so. However that recently changed and I will test it out and post the results for anyone who is interested. I do think it comes off as a gaffy old car sales trick probably due to the fact that well... it is.
 
That's an interesting point, ddavis. Are we purposely ignoring a specific set of customers because, in our opinion, that tactic is too tacky?

All of us have seen people show up in droves for silly tactics. Why not embrace it in some fashion? Otherwise you will miss out :/ a group of customers.

The reputation backlash would also be interesting to measure.
 
Jeff,

All your questions are valid: loss of credibility, damage due to hired guns, etc but there is one reality that I have experienced with CraigsList; removing prices creates more phone calls. That doesn't mean that it creates more sales, that I don't know.

We could guess that a segment of the population cares for transparency and straight forward business but perhaps another segment wants to get down and dirty to get the best deal.
 
We haven't removed pricing from our site during an event for a few years, but when we did our form leads increased 3x but the closing ratio crashed. Just about every lead was "What's the price" or "Why is there no pricing".

Truly a quantity over quality situation.

I don't think I could be convinced to remove the pricing from our website today.
 
My old store did one of these events back at the end of September into the beginning of October. The prices came off of the website a week before the mail was delivered. They also chose to keep the prices off of the site until a week or so after the sale was over. "We don't want people seeing the lower prices after they just paid $XXXX more last week" That logic drove me nuts! So they basically went without prices on the website for almost a month. This store at the time had the best merchandising with pictures, prices, descriptions of any any store in our group. The drop in VDP's from AutoTrader was off the charts. 7700+ VDP's in August to 3400 VDP's in September to 3700 VDP's in October. Not having prices on the website and listing sites caused SRP's from AutoTrader to plummet, referrals to our website went down dramatically as well. For website visitors I noticed time on site and page-views went down. If we don't deliver what they are looking for, they aren't going to stick around, right? Lead count went down during the sale from both referred traffic and normal website visitors. So those are the results that I saw from the digital side of things.

Did it work otherwise? It blows my mind the amount of people that showed up to see if they won a prize. "Everyone's A Winner Of A Golf Coin!!" It was a dime spray painted gold, not the iPad or the 60" LCD TV that was dominated the postcard that everyone felt they were going to win. They did sell some cars at unbelievable front end grosses though. They also had 3 Better Business Bureau complaints filed and several unhappy calls to the stores new General Manager. Even with all of that they consider the sale a success because of what they paid for the promotion and the amount of gross that they made. I can't help but think of the potential business that was lost though by the ATC visitors and website visitors that did not convert that normally would have. A short term gain with long term consequences in my opinion.
 
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On another note one of our best performing stores has "Please Call" where MSRP or any price should exist... not my favorite but this site gets a crap ton of leads (forms) and we haven't experienced any noticeable decline in our IntClosingRatio. People seem to like being mislead...?