A & S

?????

Been In the trade over 20 years and still get the buzz when this happens ..... Had a car come in px, got it fully valeted, took pictures, parked the car on the front (with no price board on), Friday afternoon had a phone call from a lady enquiring about it, came down a couple of hours later with her husband, they had a look around it picking the car like tyres are getting low etc, (i said to them if they buy the car i will put two new tyres on the front), then he said he had a px and didn't want to part with a lot of money, was hinting that he almost wants to do a swap, at the end they said we will be back either on Sunday or Monday. I put the car on the net after they had gone, about 20 minutes later had a phone call from a different customer, they came on Saturday morning at 9, looked at it and left a large deposit (did not tell the second customer that there was someone else interested)......then this evening had a phone call... This is briefly how the telephone conversation went AND we will make a rare close to £2k profit on this one car..... First Customer : sorry to call you so late on Sunday evening, we came to look at the car on Friday can we come in the morning to see you about it? Me : Its ok for the phone call but the car has been sold yesterday, we've taken a deposit on it. First Customer : But we said we were going to come back Me : Sorry love, someone else has left a deposit for the car First Customer : Is the car definitely been sold, we did see it first Me : yes you did see it first, but they bought it first as they committed to it first, so i am sorry the car has now been sold. (STILL BUZZING)

We have been trading from our site for 16 years now, the first year we were giving 3 months warranties on our vehicles through a warranty company. The first year we bought £6000 worth of policies from the warranty company they paid out £550 which was a claim on a Vauxhall Omega, we cheekily asked the warranty company rep for some of the money back from the policies after seeing the stats. You can guess what the reply was.... We then started to do our own in house warranties where we put £50 away in a reserve account for every warranty given, it works really well for us as we make sure the cars go out in good order so we have minimal come backs. The money saved pays for my self assessment tax. We have been using Law Data Books which are about £5.50 + vat per book.

Back in the day i never bought anything out of auction it was always the local newspapers, used to retail most of the cars purchased, some i put in to auction and still made a tidy profit. One of the reasons why i used to buy from private sellers was i could check the cars over and have a test drive as i was a newby about 20 year ago and was very nervous buying from auction. But now all my stock is bought from auction as this is an easy source of supply and cant be bothered with searching the net for stock as a percentage of the advertisers are traders advertising as private. I also know i can find some nice stock from private sellers off the likes of ebay if i searched and spent some time looking. Prices at auction only go one way and that is up but when you go to private sellers they go the other way when you start bidding.

We used to use Experian, had an account with them, about a year or so ago they have closed all small accounts, so we now do checks through autotrader, still checks are done by experian via autotrader. Cost about £3 plus vat

We do our own warranties, we have been using Law Data for years. That issue i mentioned above got to Consumers Direct from both of us, they said to me it was the customer's choice to buy the car from you, from such a distance so you have the right to ask the customer to bring the car back to be repaired to the garage it was purchased from. Consumers Direct said there are so many cars for sale in between us and where the customer came from, why yours? because yours was a better deal / bargain!!

I haven't received mine as yet, i called DVLA, quoting my plate number, they said as long as you have sent them in before the 31st December you should get them, they have a back log. I reckon its because of the extra insurance documents requested by DVLA. When you call them you have to keep asking them questions because they don't like to say a lot, eventually they will investigate for you and confirm if they have your application. I sent mine in on 30th December the DVLA said they have got my application and it is being processed and they will issue them, they said I can keep using them. My cheque for the trade plates has not been banked yet either.

We handover the cars to customers as best order as possible. There will always be comebacks, you have to keep the customer tame because of their rights (in particular the first 30 days) we always ask them to bring the car back so we can sort it out for them, once we got a customer to bring back a VW Sharan, the guy had to do about 200 mile round trip. We offered him to get it repaired an his local garage, he came back with a huge estimate (turbo related issue) so we got him to bring it back, we put him in a hire car which was more economical for us than get his local garage to repair and we pay the bill. Put the car into our local VW Specialist they cleaned the turbo put it back together...perfect we got it fixed a fraction of the price including car hire costs for a week. Always try to help as long as they don't take the michael...

Totally agree with Arfur, if you are not careful you will end up as a used car dealer, once it gets in your blood even the strongest antibiotics won't work

Hear of hacking all the time but never thought it would happen to us. So easy to get caught in this scam. Got lots of calls and emails last night and this morning. There was no contact number on the adverts callers were google searching us and calling. Called Ebay took most of the morning to sort it. As we were resetting the password the scammers were taking over again and again, then Ebay realised they were got into our email account aswell. Well annoying is an understatement.

Joys of online advertising... Earlier this evening our ebay motors pro account has been hacked, the user name has been changed but our address is still the same, think someone is trying to get payment details from desperate buyers who don't want to miss out on a bargain.

We had this come on a Mondeo we bought from auction, it was an injector, we replaced the injector and cured it, sold the car and never saw it again. I have a friend who has a taxi firm he mainly runs these Mondeos he replaced injectors and that has cured them. If you get the injectors tested and if there is a faulty one don't buy them from Ford main dealer go to a Jaguar main dealer with the code and buy them from there they are cheaper and the same. Got a feeling theyve got different part numbers but the same injectors. it may only be one injector that is faulty.

Don't know how much you've got in the car, i would bite the bullet and replace the down pipe and back box. Think of all the hassle of running around patching it up and taking it for a retest and fails again or even when you have sold the car it comes back and bites you up the @rse.

4 this week, very surprised and a few enquiries, thought it will be a quiet month, not complaining. Looking forward to and from 27th and onwards usually a good time for sales. For purchases, it will more than likely be difficult like the previous years in January, prices through the roof at BCA.