Bethany_AutoTrader

Hi Velicular, Thanks for posting your query. Whilst we can’t do this specifically via an API, we can get a data feed set-up from your website and feed multiple times a day. We do this for hundreds of dealers (some from website providers and some where the site is hosted independently). You don’t have to have one of our websites, this has never been the case. I can't see your contact details at the moment so if you'd like to private message me on here or email bethany@autotrader.co.uk with your details, I can get somebody to call you. Thanks Bethany

Hi all, First of all, thanks for sharing your feedback so openly and honestly – really constructive stuff. Rather than give you war and peace I’ll try my best to categorise your comments: Our part-ex valuations are calculated off our trade prices. They are always lower than trade to allow for costs faced by dealers in taking in a part-exchange…etc. We don’t falsify any figures. They’re based purely on what we see in the market with algorithms applied. On rare occasions if we have not seen matching observations for certain cars in the market, we may get the guide price wrong and although this is rare, it can happen and we’ll investigate each time and adjust if necessary. This is the same with any other pricing guides out there that are used by both dealers and consumers. Whether you have a field Account Manager or an office based Account Manager they should be able to add the exact same value. I appreciate some people prefer to actually sit down with somebody although it’s not something we encourage, if it’s something that really needs attention we’ll happily send a local Account Manager round to see you. The reason why we don’t encourage this is because a different field Account Manager won’t know your business as well as your current Account Manager should do. If your current Account Manager isn't adding value, you must tell us so we can look at this. One last thing on this, I understand many of you are dotted around the country and taking a day out of the business can often be difficult but providing your Account Manager is available, we welcome any of you to come into our office and spend some time with them. Some customers who attended our last discovery day have already talked to their Account Managers here in the office about coming back to spend some time with them – this is great! Above, I briefly mention Discovery Days. We hold these once a month for our independent retailers. This is an opportunity for you to come and talk to us about what delights you and what disappoints you. We share best practice and insight on the current and future digital automotive marketplace. We've had great feedback from attendees although this isn't to say everything in the garden is rosy or we’re there yet. “You've been dictatorial and arrogant in the past” – this is what we hear, please be assured this is something we’re trying extremely hard to change. We want to build better relationships with our customers and on this note, GG – we’d still love to talk to you. We travel around the country conducting seminars and regional discovery days to listen to your feedback. We’ve got several coming up in Wales and the South West before Christmas so if you’d like to know more, please just let me know or contact your Account Manager and the best thing is…they’re free! Being a trusted business partner to retailers is something that we work hard at every day. This is why we set up our Retailer Education and Insight programme. The programme was designed to help retailers navigate the changing digital automotive landscape – things are changing rapidly as consumers change their buying behaviours so we want to ensure we share trends/insights with you so you can run your business’ accordingly. I promised I wouldn't write war and peace so I’ll finish off by saying… we work hard to maintain a quality website so consumers get a smooth and useful experience so that in turn our retailer customers gain better value from the marketplace. We are also focused on driving consumers to your forecourts and it’s our mission to produce products and services based on real data and insight that will add value to your to businesses. Hope I've not missed anything but please shout up if I have. Bethany Auto Trader

Hello, Hope you're all well. Just adding my two pence worth... GG and Rosemotors are right, you can add a testimonials page. (It's easy to do within your website manager tool but if you need us to run through it, please don't hesitate to reply on here or contact me on bethany@autotrader.co.uk and we'll get in touch). I can't see your dealership details Steve so I'm unable to check your website package/templates as you may have some limitations. Here's some nice examples - http://www.stationgarage.co.uk/hall-of-fame and http://www.stephen-hannahcars.co.uk/reviews As you may or may not be aware, we have our free Dealer Ratings service whereby your customers can leave reviews based on their experience and these will be displayed on your adverts. Long term, we're looking to merge this with Dealer Websites so that Dealer Ratings becomes the main mechanism for collecting consumer feedback. Many thanks Bethany Auto Trader

Hi James, Thanks for raising this and apologies for the delayed response, I've only just seen this. There should be an option for you to untick so it doesn't keep asking you. I'll get somebody to call you to make sure all is ok. Thanks Bethany Auto Trader

Hi RS Car Sales, Thanks for sharing. Firstly I'm sorry to hear about your experience with your Account Manager, I'm keen to find out the background and who this is so I can look into this for you and make sure this doesn't happen again. As I am unable to locate your details at this stage, could you please contact me on bethany@autotrader.co.uk. I'd also like to discuss your idea around breaking down your response further. Many thanks Bethany Auto Trader

Hi Vivek, Sorry for the delayed response, I've only just come across your post as I've been out of the office. Just to reiterate Philips point (from our side), we're more than happy to answer any questions you have about i-Control. Please feel free to contact me on bethany@autotrader.co.uk and I'll get back to you asap Thanks guys Bethany Auto Trader

Hi Tracey, We're currently looking at this for you and I've replied to your recent post to advise that we'll be giving you a call today. Sorry it's taken slightly longer than normal, we look to get to the bottom of all queries as fast as we can but sometimes this includes other teams or even third party companies so can take slightly longer however if your query requires urgent attention please contact your Account Manager John as he'll be able to help pretty much straight away. Thanks Bethany

Hi Phil, Yes, we appreciate dealers continuously check their adverts so this is only classed as one visit from their IP address. Mark is actually out of the office, I've e-mailed his team for you so apologies if you've had no response or a thank you as such, I can only presume this is why. I’d like to thank you on behalf of our security team as we are always grateful to have our customers report issues or suggest improvements for the site. The team have had a look at this and although this was a technical error, it wasn’t deemed as a security risk. Please do continue to flag anything like this in future though so that we can investigate straight away. Also thank you for letting me know about the broken terms and conditions link for the money back guarantee offer, I’ve now had the team fix this and it sounds like your now able to access the page. Again I hope this information helps. Thanks Bethany

Hello, Thanks for sharing your feedback and thoughts on this topic. I can see there are a couple of comments around our figures and visits per month. These numbers are incorrect so I just thought it may help if I clarify this and share our latest figures with you. In May we received 49.4 million cross platform visits. Over 17 visits and 75 searches occur on Auto Trader platforms every second with nearly two thirds of site visits (65%) now conducted using mobile devices (including tablets), and over 30% now through Auto Trader’s market-leading apps. Inspections of individual vehicle advertisements expressed as full page advert views (FPAVs) increased by 7% to 2.7 billion in the year. Full page advert views are click-throughs from initial search result pages and are the consumer activity measure most correlated to vehicle transactions between consumers and retailers. This means that more than 85 vehicles are being virtually inspected by potential buyers every second of every day on the Auto Trader marketplace. For April 2015, we generated 650 million page views. 5.6 million unique visitors that came back 7 times in the month clocking up 40 million visits with average views per visitor at 16 (this is all verified by comScore who also measure all other traffic to every automotive classified web site). We also estimate that the total size of the UK dealer universe is around 20,000, of which last year 13,452 dealers were customers of Auto Trader. I hope this helps. Many thanks, Bethany Auto Trader

Good evening, It’s disappointing to read your comments @jamslug and interesting to see the mixture of comments within the thread. Our business is built on your success and we are committed to providing a better service, to help you be even more successful than you are today. Your feedback is invaluable to us and we rely on it to help shape our products and services. We’d really appreciate it if you could contact your Account Manager or myself directly on bethany@autotrader.co.uk so that we can talk to you. @GreenGiant in answer to your question ‘Wouldn't you want to find out why so many customers were so unhappy?’ Yes, absolutely! We’ve been running Dealer Discovery days whereby we invite you, our contract customers into our offices to talk to us about what delights you and what disappoints you. It really is the right time to share your views and experiences so that we can improve the way we do things moving forward. If we don’t know where we’re going wrong, then we’ll struggle to get better. We’d also love you to re-consider coming in to talk to us. You can find out more by going back to the forum and clicking into the post ‘Come and talk to us’. Many thanks Bethany Auto Trader

Hello, I notice you mention the new forum within Explore is now harder to find. We would like to contact you to discuss your feedback in further detail. We are keen to listen to all suggestions and idea's in order to improve the overall user experience. We'll be in touch shortly. Many thanks, Bethany Auto Trader

Hello, Thanks for taking the time to share your honest feedback. We’re sorry to hear about the problems you've had in recent months. Please be assured we’re working hard to iron out any outstanding issues on stock presentation. Could you please refer your specific concerns via your Auto Trader representative, or through Portal, where our team will be best placed to respond? We also appreciate your concerns on valuations, but equally how important it is for potential buyers to get everything they expect in one place - to smooth their journey to you. The reality is that in the new information age there are a myriad different valuation sources that buyers find online – and which they use. Our aim in providing this tool is to help drive business, something that I am glad to report we continue to do with increasing stock levels and the generation of more leads. In January for example we reported a 6.3% year on year increase in full page ad views for retail partners. We don’t always get everything right, and we are genuinely sorry to read your comments. But we are committed to providing a better service and helping your business succeed, even if it may not always seem that way. Please do make direct contact and we’ll do everything we can to help address your specific concerns. Many thanks, Bethany Auto Trader