Took the plunge... Motors Vs, Autotrader, what happened?

[jamslug 91]

Because Autotrader dominates my overheads I wont spend another penny on advertising. But I also believe that when a new product comes on the market, it should be tried, because you never know how things might pan out for you.

So after a really bad experience with Exchange and Mart, absolute total load of crap. I was really reluctant to try another small classified site. (when I say small, i mean relatively small compared to the giant) . ... so I am talking about motors.

 

So I took the plunge and what happened?

 

Well autotrader will deliver me approximately 0 emails per month, 1 if I am a lucky boy. and also 0 calls per month.

 

This is how they compare, you can view the number of leads in both of their response stats.

 

In the last 30 days.....

Autotrader: 0 Calls, 0 Emails

Motors: 7 Calls, 5 Emails

 

 

After I have just written that, I don't even know why I am still with Autotrader. I pay them about £1000 per month. That's £12000 a year...... WHAT AM I DOING!!!!!! I am about to cancel auto trader completely.

 

 

I am wild.

 

 

[williamblackshaw 43]

I am starting wonder does platforms eg Motors, AT, ebay work better with certain vehicles, views guys? Anyone tried the free RAC listings yet

[umesh 336]

Just got confirmation from RAC my cars will go live in 24 hours !

[Tom 164]

I use Ebay and Motors and they do work so haven't really bothered with AT. 

[James Baggott 227]

Interesting stuff guys

[sparky 274]

Because Autotrader dominates my overheads I wont spend another penny on advertising. But I also believe that when a new product comes on the market, it should be tried, because you never know how things might pan out for you.

So after a really bad experience with Exchange and Mart, absolute total load of crap. I was really reluctant to try another small classified site. (when I say small, i mean relatively small compared to the giant) . ... so I am talking about motors.

 

So I took the plunge and what happened?

 

Well autotrader will deliver me approximately 0 emails per month, 1 if I am a lucky boy. and also 0 calls per month.

 

This is how they compare, you can view the number of leads in both of their response stats.

 

In the last 30 days.....

Autotrader: 0 Calls, 0 Emails

Motors: 7 Calls, 5 Emails

 

 

After I have just written that, I don't even know why I am still with Autotrader. I pay them about £1000 per month. That's £12000 a year...... WHAT AM I DOING!!!!!! I am about to cancel auto trader completely.

 

 

I am wild.

 

Good luck.

 

I made the decision to leave AT at the start of year. It wasn't an easy decision and one that I took a long time over but I took the plunge and put my eggs in the Motors/Ebay basket.

 

To cut a long story short, it didn't work. I'm now back with AT(I've even taken out i control), it's more than paying for itself and I'm getting on like a house on fire with my new local rep who has actually been a great help and a real positive. Sadly Motors is being dumped and I'm 50/50 about ebay. One thing I'm absolutely certain about though is that I can't live without AT, so rather than fight it I'm now embracing it.

[jimreidvehicle 255]

We still sell over 400 cars per year and we do not use AutoTrader. We felt that we received better value for money elsewhere. In fact we now sell more cars via Facebook than we ever did using Autotrader.

 

But I do respect Sparky's comments, as no one knows their business better than themselves and you have to either DITCH Autotrader OR embrace it, there is NO in-between.............I think we have all tried that!

[Phil H 124]

One of My New Years Resolutions was to never I'll never use autotrader again and here's why. Back in 2008/09 I signed up to Dealer Edit for a 3 month trial period, cancelled it after the 3 months as it was just to expensive for my size of business reverted back to just using ebay and advertising selected Vans on autotader on an individual basis. Over the years I've found out that for some reason Vauxhall Vivaro's sell better when advertised on Autotrader, So last year I Placed an advert for a very desirable model in a good colour with sensible miles, after 3 weeks still not one phone call so I go to check pricing and edit the ad if required, ad appears as usual with the brief description and contact numbers but when you clicked on it you got an error message, tried all of my other ad's and they did the same, phoned autotrader who said that  they would work to get the issue resolved but I wanted to know why this had happened to all of my ad's and nobody else's. A couple of days later I got a phone call from a Very Polite lady who said that she'd received an email from another department who said the problem was caused by a block on my email address placed by the dealer edit department. She didn't know why or how long this had been going on for but would find out for me and let me know. I got her direct line number and name and she said she would personally deal with it. Several phone calls from me to her later I've never got hold of her again, left several messages not one replied to and still to this day I don't know how long had the email block had been in place? Was it only a few weeks? As I'd just told the the rep never to contact me again as I wasn't interested in Dealer Edit I was quite happy as I was. Or had it been in place for all those years since I cancelled my dealer edit subscription? Guess I'll never know and but I do know that his is the only new years resolution that I've managed to keep.

[GreenGiant 287]

I don't suppose anyone would be a bit surprised if they did it out of spite.

The number of dissatisfied customers of theirs is astonishing. I spent a good hour yesterday reading through their own forum and cannot remember if there was a single contributor (non-A/T employee) that had a good word to say about them. It just seems to be an endless stream of angry dealers, sick of being dictated to by the Company that they employ! Bearing in mind that only a very small percentage of their customers actually use their forum, the actual number must be an opportunity for somebody to form a meaningful protest group.

 

Here's the thing:

If this was your company, and your own website/facebook page/twitter feed was rammed full of many, many customers telling you your business model was wrong, that your attitude sucks, you are arrogant and greedy, don't you thing you might want to have a little think about how things were going? Wouldn't you want to find out why so many customers were so unhappy? Or would you just ignore them, tell them they're wrong and keep crashing on to the next PR disaster?

[Bethany_AutoTrader 5]

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

[Wood235 36]

When we was a customer, after so many years, was a waste of time trying to explain to Autotrader what we expected from them and overpricing, all we got was very bolshy sales people talking over us telling us we was doing it all wrong! Best thing we did was leave as we are selling as many cars and have lost one of the biggest overheads that we had! There's absolutely no way we will be returning!

[Gavin@Rousdon 137]

The Autotrader debate rages on!!! If people in the motor trade feel it doesn't work or is a rip off the answer is simple....Don't use it. 

 

If it turns out you sell as many cars without it there is only one winner...thats yourself. 

 

It's no secret that AT is expensive, you know that before you sign up, do they get it right all the time...I doubt it, Retail Checker is an example of this, will all knew at some point Deltapoint would become chargeable and the product that's replaced it has many flaws. 

 

I'm sure there are lots of variables that dictate how viable AT is to a business, location, type of vehicle, cost of vehicle, size of business etc etc AT works for some of us and not for others. Vote with your custom but please stop moaning about it. If AT are really that bad they will implode soon and the knockers can have the last laugh.......................well until Motor's increase their prices tenfold and the cycle starts again.

[Wood235 36]

Some of us were onboard when AT first started doing the website for around 25 - 30 cars and we were paying approx £300 per/month, we didn't choose for the price to go up approx 7 times what our original price was! We do understand inflation but this was rediculous! When we mentioned to them it was too dear, they turned around and told us the cars were too dear! Best thing we did was pull the plug, we should have done sooner as we would have saved a small fortune! A good site on a busy road doesn't always need to be wasting money advertising vehicles at the other end of the country!

These sites are For people to air their views as honestly as possibly and that is what we are doing!!!

[GreenGiant 287]

Thanks Gavin, you've reiterated some good points... except for the bit where you try to tell us what we should and shouldn't say in an open forum. If you're not interested in the topic or the view expressed, you don't have to read it. But I don't think you should be telling people not to express an opinion because you don't want to hear it.

'Cos it's a little bit hypocritical to go on a forum and complain about people who go on a forum and complain. Don't you think?

[Wood235 36]

Very true Green Giant! Also I will say many of us did cop the ump because of the way we were spoken to as if we were naive little school boys!!!

[GreenGiant 287]

And you should put your hand up before you speak, too.

[Gavin@Rousdon 137]

GG maybe I should have phased it different, I'm happy for people to rant and rave on forums it's part of makes them fun, the point I was trying to make was that we all have the power to chose who we advertise with, to moan about AT but to carry on using them with giving them a bit of credit seems a little hypocritical as they must still be offering a value to a business ('return on investment' I think is the phase accountants use). I enjoy hearing about people who drop AT and it works for them as its interesting to compare what work for one site but not another. It's always dangerous to look back at how much things cost a few years ago because times change, I can remember paying £5 I think for a lady to come out and photograph a car and take the advert for that weeks AT on a Monday for an advert that appeared in Friday's magazine, then paying £1200 for a tiny advert in Yellow Pages. We now live in a instant world where the car advert is live within hours if not minutes and Yellow Pages are no more. Which advertising platform would we rather have in today's world???

 

I think one of big issues AT has at present is that it has so much 'Data' thats its trying to find a way of selling it back to us, the problem is that they don't have all the data so what they are trying to sell is flawed at present. Will this become their undoing in the end?

[GreenGiant 287]

That is the real problem. It seems that AT have adopted the Ryanair approach and have decided that every single thing that they do has a cost attached and that cost must be charged out to someone. And the more they can break down the individual components in their product* (i'll come back to that), the more things they can charge for. Nothing for nothing. No extra levels of service to delight the customers, no altruistic gestures for the greater good of the industry. Just invoices. The bigger, the better.

 

*this is the thorn in my foot. We pay them to work for us (the sellers) in providing a collective online portal where we can all advertise our products to our customers. At no point in that chain should they be attempting to control, influence or dictate how we interact with our customers and on what terms we choose to do business with each other. The changes they have recently made have a pernicious undertone that stinks of an attempt to control the market in a way that would benefit them, and to hell with everyone else. It's the thin end of the wedge in my view.

If it's OK for them to tell our customers how much they should get for their car, how much we should buy, advertise and sell our cars for and how much we should make on each deal, then what is the point of us?

 

[jimreidvehicle 255]

GG I think you have summed that up pretty well. WE been over backwards to help our customers, the amount of extra hours we carry out on behalf of our customers that we don't account for is really scary however it is one of the overwhelming reasons why we gain and retain so many customers. AT have to continue charging for everything!!! Nothing is free! But guess what, the data they use comes from us, what happened before delta point and retail checker, oh yes we found out ourselves, all AT have done has made it easier for us and are now charging us for making it easy! Instead of inviting customers to their HQ to brainwash them and to justify why they cost so much they should in fact be taking the customers they have lost over the years(like us ) to their HQ to show where all our menu used to go!

Yes moving from AT is one of the biggest things you will ever do in the Motortrade however there are so many other routes you can use especially Social Media which are much cheaper, ok they are maybe less effective with stock turnover but all the same you will continue to sell cars. 

I'm sure EVERYONE would agree that it would best if there was just ONE classified used car website in the UK, one one that customers can search for used cars and see ALL the used cars for sale in ONE place, this would make sure your cars were seen and for the customers they know exactly where to look, however this will NEVER happen unless AT represent value for money for EVER dealer. The more cars on the website the cheaper it should be to advertise, obviously this is just my opinion. But like someone has already said on this thread, we all understand price increases that are justified because of better service, wider audience and better products however when we started in 2003 we paid AT £1 per car per week, what is the price now????? 

Answer this question.............has your margin or profit increased by this amount? I rest my case!

OFFER VALUE FOR MONEY ADVERTISING!