Phil H

Hi Bethany, I've just found another fault on your website, it's on your terms and conditions of your 7 day money back guarantee, when I click on the terms and conditions of your guarantee it teels me I've taken a wrong term, here's a link to the broken page http://www.autotrader.co.uk/AT2/product_pages/_selling/money-back-terms.html

Bethany thanks for joining in our debate, I apologize if my figures are incorrect but the only free reference to your figures I could get came from www.alexa.com/siteinfo/autotrader.co.uk may i say the figures that you've provided are pretty impressive, when you say 85 vehicles per second are being virtually inspected by potential buyers do you have any way of taking into consideration dealers checking their own adverts and competitors pricing in these figures. (quite easy to do just remove any matching ip address's of your dealer edit/ autotrademail customers that also carry out searches using the same ip address). As you say Vehicles per second I take it that these include cars, vans, bikes, caravans, boats, plant etc. What would really help us though would be a breakdown by vehicle type if you could, Many thanks PS you've managed to come on here to correct your figures but still not said the thank you for me alerting your company about the security risk that I found on your website the other day that exposed your websites code, If you would like to ask Mark W in your security department he'll confirm receipt of the email along with the screenshot of the error message that I sent him.

I'd of had to reduce the price significantly to of sold it as is, the side in the pictures is the best side, so made more selling it painted. This one wasn't one of the ones that were mis described by manheim I actually went to a physical auction to buy this. I may be brave and mad but not brave or mad enough to actually buy a Royal Mail van on line I have some standards.

After selling cars for nearly 20 years I got fed up of having to watch my P's & Q's and put up with all of the excuses as to why customers don't want to buy (wrong colour, little scratch etc. etc) so I decided to give vans a go, now I don't prep them, let them see them in the condition that they arrive in, show them the pedigree of the detailed service history and offer a full repair and repaint in any solid colour of their choice free of charge, metallic's extra, He looked at the bodywork and I told him just imagine that now it looks like your missus does in the morning without her make up on, but once I've fixed it up it'll look like she does when dolled up for a night out, but if we take her for a spin I bet she's a good ride, so we did. We went on the test drive dressed in my lucky smurf T shirt which says Pull My Finger on it, the customer did and out popped one stinking the van out, He laughed, swore at me and called me a smelly A**e B@@@@@@, He bought it asked if I'll paint it metallic black for him as he's always wanted a black van. He's left here over the moon, couldn't wait to leave me a deposit as he's getting a mechanically sound van fully painted in his colour choice,he's only paying £4500 for it and more importantly he left with a smile on his face. Would you get away with selling a car in this condition and Speaking to the customer like that? Thought not and that's why I sell vans. And GG I'll apologize for my grammar in advance.

Ok so it's mainly a big boys club of franchised dealers, so I have 2 questions to ask firstly do you remember when AT first launched dealer edit, the deal was that if you were a franchised dealer it cost £1 per car per week to advertise so now that a partnership has been formed will we see a return to these advertising deals, and secondly to my Buddy GG as You're a franchised dealer have you had an invite to join or are you a little bit outspoken for them?

GG sorry for my bad use of grammar in my English just like you have ocd for this I have ocd for doing something to stop these big greedy boys and with very good reason that you will all find out about very soon.

any idea on who any of the others are James?

At 10.30 this morning I found a major security issue with AT's website which would of been gold to any hacker as it exposed the code for their website if this had of fallen into a hackers hands they could of brought the website down and cost them a lot of money. But me being the decent human being that I am I decided to tell them about it (even though they treat us like they do and I've no time for them) all that I asked for was a public thanks on this thread, still waiting for it. if I'd of found the same sort of issue with paypal I'd be £40000 richer now, If any of you want me and my web developer to test your website's free of charge for any such threats we will do it for you just message me your website url. Thanks for having my back GG if we all stick together we can make a real big impact.

So based on the evidence motors are partners with judge service who share the same address as trusted dealers who are in partnership with AT and share the same address as perrys. Motors and AT combined in the same venture surely not. So I called judge service and they confirmed that judge service and trusted dealers are the essentially the same company. So I called trusted dealers and asked who their parent company is? was it perrys? I was told that they didn't have a one and they were an independent company, so I asked if that was the case then why was the ltd company registered address the same as perrys head office at which point I could sense the nervousness in her voice and was informed that she was busy and had to go. SO what's all this about transparency and trust based on the evidence it seems like it maybe just another scheme concocted by the big boys trying to get bigger and squeeze out all of us little boys.

Ok I'm confused as to who actually owns Trusted Dealers if you do a whois search for the domain name you only get a limited company number 7342935, so you check that number at companies house and you get trusted dealers ltd and the registered address in Northampton, then you google that address and you get perrys group ltd with the phone number 01604 667300, so you google that number and you get perrys motor sales ltd with the website perrys.co.uk. Google perrys head office and you get the same number and the same address. Confused? So am I. Can anyone tell me exactly who owns Trusted Dealers or is it just the NFDA in partnership with perrys who are now in partnership with AT. One thing this exercise should teach you is that the internet is not only for looking at naughty pictures.

Ok AT have 8m views per month, alexa say they have an average of 15.33 page views per visitor per day so if you divide 8m by 15.33 you get 521852.5766 visitors per month, these are not unique visitors just visitors. Now AT say that they have 26254 dealers that advertise with them so lets assume that these dealers check their adverts once a week for pricing and advert presentation that's 105016 visitors accounted for, when I was using AT I used to check my adverts (I only used to advertise 5 maximum at any one time) for pricing at least twice a week so if every dealer does the same as me then that would account for 210032 visitors, if they checked their adverts 3 times a week as I believe most people do especially when the job goes quiet then that figure would increase to 315048 visitors from the trade which would actually mean that more people from the trade are using AT to check pricing than potential customers. I would be interested in your thoughts on this especially on how many times a week you check your own adverts so that maybe we can get a more accurate picture on this. Also I'm not sure if the 26254 dealers that AT say advertise with them are just dealer edit customers or include those who advertise on a per advert basis so the number of trade visitors could be a lot higher. NOW AT I know that you'll be reading this post with interest and I think a public thank you on this post is due for me taking the time to call your dealer call centre and press the option for security, wait 15 mins on hold on the phone, then call your sales line and get straight through to someone to inform you about the security vulnerability that I found within your website only to be told that someone will call me back within 24 hours. They have called me back and I have informed your security team about it who have now fixed it. May I say for the record that it's the quickest return phone call that I have ever had from your company.

I always ask them how good they are at solitaire, if the answer is yes then you know when they're left alone that's all they'll be doing on the computer whilst you're out instead of making the pitch look nice.

How nice it must be to make that sort of margin instead of £500 - £800 on a £10000 investment and having to guarantee it for a length of time and not get away with treating your customers like dog dirt, even though some of ours treat us like it.

I advertise my vans on Ebay and do quite well from it and it cost's a fraction of the price of AT but I never engage in an email conversation with someone who emails me after ten o'clock at night because in my experience these people have just come in from the pub after having a few and by the time they read the email in the morning they've forgotten what they did the night before, so all I do is simply reply Thanks for your inquiry please call me on (my phone number) to discuss, that way it filters out the serious customers from the time wasters. Another tip is don't let your advert auto renew end it yourself leave it an hour or so then relist it and it appears in the search results as newly listed. Another thing I do quite often is Use the Headline " 1 Week only WAS (price) NOW ONLY (price) SAVE (saving) and it creates the urgency. These tips are simple to do but I find quite effective. Hope this advice works for you all.

I think AT should be worried not just from the likes of the RAC but from the backlash from the dealers who for years have seen the prices that we pay for advertising go up year on year well above the rate of inflation, I spoke to one dealer the other day whose AT bill was now nearly £6000 per month and showed him a portal that I've been developing for some time now that has the ability to really take a lot of business off several of the big boys in different sectors of the job including AT and he was amazed by it. His exact words where I've been telling AT for years that it's not the big boys that you need to watch out for but for the little boy who comes up with something revolutionary and can run it for a fraction of the costs of a big organization and he believes what I've got is it. Only time will tell but it'll certainly give them a run for their money and stop dealers margins being eroded by the big boys.

I think cap should hold a simple competition and the top 10 winners should get an all expenses paid weekend away with the missus at their expense on the next murder mystery weekend to reward us all. Go on Phil see what you can arrange.

fair point GG, in an ideal world to solve this problem all you need to do is get a nitro button fitted for overtaking that can only be used once an hour for situations like this then the problems sorted. But then again what's an ideal world another rant for another week maybe?

It's just like we do now offering free nationwide delivery on certain cars or vans as most of us have done in the past and will continue to do in the future, my only concern with a 7 day test drive is how do we distinguish between the genuine customers and the ones who just need to hire a car free of charge for a few days and are trying it on. Pay in full up front, get 7 days free drive away insurance, do whatever they need a car for in, then say sorry not for me and get a full refund, then the following week do the same to another garage and so on. Strict terms and conditions regarding damage and mileage combined with a register connecting all of the garages partaking in any such scheme to weed out the scammers from the genuine customers would be needed IMO for a 7 day test drive to have any chance of working properly for us dealers.

Sorry to many years selling vans in the motortrade

Kinky And Kind, Keiths X Rated Journal, Under Water Holder and X Ray your Knees. Oh well fun over for today I'm off to catch up on today's Jeremy Kyle. Let me know your Beep Beep Scores from the way home in the morning.

and I'm running out of VRM's you got any for me?

You're a natural I was only taught naughty words at my school, how about these PXU and ZUZ?

you're good at this countryman here's another JNX

I've taken your advice and decided to play the number plate game instead, another simple game look at the last 3 letters of any VRM's on your pitch and make a sentence for instance VDR = Very Dirty Rebecca or FVB = Fat Victors Bum struggling with this one though XDS any ideas?