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As I wrote yesterday I’ve yet to see an engineers report. By the sounds of it you aren’t going to see one either! The sort of punter buying 15yr old hatchbacks is not the sort of person prepared to spend money on engineers reports. Your customer is clearly a pillock. Do not enter into phone discussions. Do not communicate by text. Letters only. Do not communicate with the boyfriend - he has f.a. to do with the purchase. The punter stinks of being a penniless twat & by the sound of it this saga has virtually ended because they’ve tripped themselves up a few times. Tbh if they phoned me they’d be told “Letters only, now f.o. & don’t try taking the piss. Goodbye, do your best”.

FYI D&M... We've been here before and currently have two ongoing ones. We're happy to fix or refund where justified but when we smell something isn't 100% our procedure is to request the car comes to us for inspection or we receive a written engineers report from the customers chosen garage with a report, current mileage, recommendations and cost to carry out recommendations. We stress that this must be in writing from the engineer/garage in question. No phone calls. No texts. No personally written emails. We make it clear these will simply not be replied to. Written report from the garage if they are unwilling to bring the car to you. It's always interesting how many issues simply disappear when you request something in writing and follow a procedure.

Devils advocate really. They have too many dealers on the site advertising with many large groups moaning about the response. Only way to slim down to keep the bread and butter happy is to cut the throat of the smaller independents. Some people still think it's a personal vendetta, but in a business sense when you think about it, it's pretty simple strategy. I understand completely those smaller independents that are reliant on AT for their customers will be annoyed again, but have you tried other sources? Here's a list of good platforms with a decent market share to try... CarGurus Cost about £450 p/m with 100, might be a tad more now, will pay for itself quite easily Ebay Motors Cost, next to nothing but the return is depending on your unit stock value as over 10k, I'll say definitely a no no - too many time wasting chancers FaceBook Target Drive your ads is key. Cost, depending what you want to spend but you need to get you're page with lots of likes and the starting up can be costly. Eventually you'll be spending £30-£40 per vehicle, then £20-£30 (basically, as your page likes grow you can spend less as your 'likers' will share the post for you) From our experience, you'll sell 1 in 6 this route. Very target driven which takes a lot of time to work out as each area is different and only certain makes / models sell so you may need to re-evaluate your stock purchasing to go down this route entirely. Brand Awareness Campaign Using Local Advertising Papers / Bill Boards / Roundabout ads / etc you can try to launch a brand awareness. It's tricky in this business unless you are specializing in a certain make / model. A good campaign with a lot of local attention should cost you around £800 - 1,000 p/m depending on your area. That should be with 2 full page paper ads. Always check their disbursement of the paper and don't go by their stats. A good way to check if the paper is good locally is from its website. If they have a busy website, with lots of comments, lots of Faceboo likes or even a forum with a lot of activity, it's a good one. Careful though, there are still the 'conman' / 'scam' papers out there! Selling unique? PistonHeads! Sports, unique and anything outrageously upgraded / spec'd should be here! Cost... We pay £575 p/m for up to 80 cars from there and get an adequate response. Again very area and make / model driven. Not got flashy cars, sports cars, Fiesta St's or Corsa VXr's? Not for you. At the end of the day Advertising is key and thinking about what advertisers make and getting upset as they rack in millions should not prevent you from making a decision to advertise with them or not. At the end of the day if you pay them £10,000 but they give you £30,000 worth of profit in sales, that should be your decision maker. Does it pay or not? It's not a hard question to answer if you just follow simple stats you can do yourself. Ask your customers where they saw the advert when they arrive on your premises. This is within our sales teams meet and greet agenda, and they mark it down. At the final point of sale where the car is collected and the invoice is make, the sales person again asks where they customer saw the advert. We use this information on a quarterly period and swear by it, it's very inspiring to actually know where you customers come from rather than being horse fed what your advertising sales managers want to feed you. It's YOUR COMPANY, MAKE YOUR OWN CHOICES, BUT DO YOUR OWN STATS! Hope that helps some.

I think reviews are worthwhile, good or bad. Ive had customers comment on seeing them and it influencing their decision. It just helps to get them to come in or ring in the first place. If a customer is faced with 2 similar cars and one dealer has good reviews and the other doesnt have any reviews, it will make a difference to them.

The defence rests.....

an insignificant or an old focus both go to council estates,they are the equivalent of the old montego cavalier vectra etc so im sure if you offered it for a roll of old lino and a bag of snot someone on social media has one better cheaper innit mate anyone can buy this old shite at the block and try to bubble up what is your usp and dont say price because running to the bottom rarely sells cars one little tip afore yee buy think whos gonna buy it off you i wont buy anything unless i see profit in the window landmarks i leave for holiday soujourns have you considered joining the imd something that might help?