Dealer research

Trade Vet - Thanks so much for the reply! Some food for thought. The reason we are here on this forum, plus other forums is to find out what would be of real value to dealers, rather than just creating "another" classified site. we're mobile first (60%+ of all AT views are mobile). The thought process was...... Free for dealers for the first 3 months (Dealers interested prior to launch sign up) We then have vehicles on, dealers play with it, we then get valuable feed back about whats good, missing thats of value to dealers, bad and changes to be made. We make changes then officially go live. For us, its all dealer led to work FOR dealers. The other thing to note is that, we know that for the first 3 months, its about getting dealers vehicles on and public visiting it. Therefore, theres no financial penalty for dealers putting stock on with us as,(we're not daft) cars may not sell due to low traffic BUT.....we've got to start somewhere! Hi Sparky, We have sleepless nights and doubt ourselves sometimes too! I know i do as the creator of this. Many sleepless nights and remortgaging etc! I wouldnt do that if i didnt believe there was a better way to work than AT(i know other competitors out there but none seem to get it right) Anyhow, Would you give it a go for first 3 months free? (no contract either BTW!)

Thanks for the reply Jim. All valuable things to think about. Have a good week

Hi Jim, could I just ask you why you think other classified sites never worked?

Hi Jim Cheers for the reply. Honestly, i dont mind any questions good or bad! The bad questions are brilliant because if we cant answer them, we're knackered! We need to be able to answer all difficult questions. At the end of the day we need to be different and these questions ensure we craft our offering to.... 1. Add more value to dealers than the competition 2. Sells cars for dealers! 3. Gets end users using it. We have a USP (a secret sauce, a colonels secret herb mix so to speak!) that isnt ready to be mentioned yet. Its ground breaking and we are due to go live on September 1st with Beta testing for Dealers interested (for free obviously). Website will be live by 1st August with what we do, what we are about and how we are different (thats where people can sign up for 3 months free and Beta testing for our feedback). Funding - Seed funding already raised Cheers P.S We've hit a bump in the road and need help - Are your feeds to AT all generic and an CSV/XML file or something else? Anyone willing to share a feed so we can see what it looks like? Dave

Hi All, Im new here and contrary to what some have said, Im not from AT! The truth is, we are here to DESTROY AT from a dominance perspective I just what to say, thanks to this mega community for answering questions and essentially just being helpful! You could have told me to sod off so for that i'm saying cheers everyone! So who am i? I'm from a startup, i was compiling research on essentially why so many of these big companies like AT seem to be so arrogant and take your money, make changes without asking and generally messing you about simply because they can! (Based on the comments you gave me!) With that in mind. With so many of the dealers at least somewhat annoyed.... QUESTION Would you give an alternative a go? First 3 months would be free for early adopters plus we understand you already pay for ads but would you pay someone unproven (honestly) if it was crafted around you? The alternative would be crafted from your comments, to work for you rather than us. Examples of this could be.... App first priority (you all know how many view on mobile now) No contract Simple pricing. we're talking 2 tier. nothing else. (WTF, A/T, car gurus and motors have ridiculous ones for mobile, web ads, etc) No "fair price, expensive price etc comments on the ad" No, "how long its been for sale" We use the price guide like parkers or glass etc that you, as a community prefer (based on a poll that we would do) Local search results first Purely focused on cars not other tat Uses your AT feeds so no messing/faffing about to use it. There's so much else we have planned but the truth is. We want you to tell us what you want so it works 100% for you rather than the other way round. That's why we've been asking away randomly! lol. If you've read this far, any comments would be great and also, we'll be putting this all on the site with the full list soon but we want your advice. Anyone that is interested, we will be releasing a "early release" for dealers to play with, test, and tell us whats missing before it went live. If your interested we can (can we cardealermag admin?) put the website on here when it goes live and you can register interest. Any dealer that registers gets the first 3 months free. In return we get your feedback and cars on the site! Ta Dave.

Hi Umesh, this may sound cheeky but just came across your post as i am looking to find out more about data feed for AT. Am i right in saying that if you have multiple cars to upload you wouldn't do that manually (take a pic, enter description etc like for 1 car). Instead you upload a "feed" automatically to AT? Is that right? if so what does a feed look like? is it a spreadsheet? or is it a line of code? Ta in advance Umesh Dave

Hiya all, Can anyone advise on how (if your not just selling one car) you get multiple cars on AT. ive been reading that you get a feed or something but what does a feed look like? so if your selling say 20 cars on AT - Do you manually upload each car every time or do something on a spreadsheet and upload it to AT? Any comment would be mint! Dave (Newbie, finding me feet)

Sorry no idea what your talking about. Im here to find out about the dealer market and fundamentally, why the heck people still us AT when it does many things against a dealer and TBH why very little of Dealers have moved to an alternative like motors.com, car gurus etc. (not to mention as "Max Branning" alludes too....its pretty expensive) Your thoughts? Dave

Sorry no idea what your talking about. Im here to find out about the dealer market and fundamentally, why the heck people still us AT when it does many things against a dealer and TBH why very little of Dealers have moved to an alternative like motors.com, car gurus etc. (not to mention as "Max Branning" alludes too....its pretty expensive) Your thoughts? Dave

Cheers Max, Not too bad value for money i suppose.

Whats AT charge for dealers with more than 20 cars? surely still not £44 for 3 weeks?

Hi Rory, Cheers for the reply, Thats what im hearing tbh, AT is the king and you either live or die by it. (also, im not saying AT is all bad, just wondered the impact of new boys like motors car gurus etc. they just cant compete by the looks of it.) Dealers told me that for cars under £2500 ebay was the king but be prepared to take a 10% discount from buyers!

Hi RS and cheers for the reply. Been trying to find out about cargurus but secretive! please let me know the contract thing? I rang and they said £250 a month but is that for unlimited cars? No one has mentioned adwords before but i know (done right) its powerful. On the quantify thing...you can actually get true figures of visits and how much spend resulted in inquiries on a specific vehicle you know? They do phone number thing where you get a report on number of phone calls (BTW you can get a phone number for each car you sell on adwords so you get a report per phone number) hope that helps but just ask me and ill help.

Hi Max, ta for the reply. Facebook is great but for me (a car lover) i just use AT now as a car magazine to look at cars. From research ive found the below...whats your thoughts AT - Great for numbers but expensive and complicated billing i think. the pricing index with "fair" price etc is annoying dealers (anything else good/bad?) motors.co.uk Free listings (brilliant) but then strange pricing model £8 a car then pay per "lead assist" at 27p a lead assist so that £8 can end up being £30/40 quid quickly (sounds great alternative to AT) Ebay - Listing fee and selling fee but have great visitor numbers but not a true car platform (is that a problem if it shifts cars, suppose you cant upload a feed) cargurus - they take your feed automatically and list how expensive cheap it is and how long its been on the pitch. plus they charge (couldnt quite get an answer from them) £250 a month to list (unsure if thats unlimited cars or if i have that completely wrong) any update on that would be mega. Sorry for the long reply but thoughts? Dave

Cheers for the reply Mojo121. I thought cargurus charged something like £250 a month to list? Also from research i noted an annoyance from the dealer industry that they stated how long a car had been on a pitch and if the price was expensive/cheap? Ebay is cracking and i thought the same but I doubt dealers would move to an alternative platform and say bye bye to AT (cold turkey)? Maybe run in tandem i suppose but that means 2 lots of advertising payments which (i presume) dealers wouldnt want to double the marketing budget to give Ebay/new platform a go. I can see how dealers are kindov caught in the AT trap the more i research it. Thoughts? BTW. its funny because AT is actually a basic platform, Im sure there are annoyances or features dealers wish it had! Hi Metcars, Cheers for the reply. I thought that but wondered if it was too cheeky! My main question was really about AT, Car gurus, e bay and Motors. The positive and negative of each of them or if that was too much....AT only. Plus....(just said this in a previous comment) AT is a bloody basic platform but has the power of so many dealers on it that no one will go cold turkey with another platform but then, wont (i presume) want to run another platform and pay for it as a viable alternative to AT. So dealers are caught. (not to say AT is all bad BTW. im on it all the time looking at cars) So suppose.....What features from these platforms are missing? or a nice to have?

Thanks for the reply. My thoughts too, shame really. BTW, im a student doing research for a paper on the motor industry but....a passionate car fan!

I wondered, after browsing here for a while now AT, Motors and CAr gurus seem to have thier flaws and, for some reason, work against car dealers in certain areas, example of this is Cargurus stating how long a car has been on the forecourt! AT saying if a car dealers price is good or high. The list goes on but how do others feel about this? Considering your paying them good money to advertise....what do you hate about them and....what could they do better? feature wise to make it easier for Dealers and, treat dealers fairly. (p.s, i think its realtively expensie to advertise a car on these platforms. motors.com seemed ok but now charge 27p per view or summit???) Thoughts