Manage Your Inventory Feeds (Cars.com and others)

There has been plenty of controversy about cars.com and other vendors taking dealers inventory and feeding them to some really nasty anti-dealer sites such as cargurus.com. I believe that Jim Ziegler has done a great job standing up for the automotive retail community by fighting for what is right. I am seeing dealers cancel cars.com left and right while others just stay neutral about it and ignore the drama.

The question is “should you cancel cars.com?”

I have a very open minded thinking pattern about this topic. While I personally do not like what they were doing with sending customers other dealer’s inventory for less price and the fact that they have been pushing inventory without authorization to other third party sites I have to question dealers how they are monitoring these sources. Gone are the days where you can just “set it and forget it” with the service that third party vendors are providing. This needs to be proactively managed on a daily basis. Internet Managers must have a process for tracking their email leads, phone calls, conversations with customers for individual sources.

Every morning, you should be getting emails from cars.com with a call tracking report of the previous day’s phone traffic. How do you use it? Check the CRM and make sure the calls were logged. Listen to the calls. Make sure your people are doing their jobs so you can monitor your ROI. Do the same for email leads. Also, look at how much traffic these third parties drive to your site as well as how long these visitors stick with your site. This is in essence like “Mad Science” but this will tell you if you need to fire your third party vendors. It maybe a painstaking task that you spend 1 hour a day on but it is important to scientifically know how it working with you.

My strategy is simple, “if your pricing your inventory right and your getting good hits then your lead management process should work hand in hand with that to get more of these leads in the door”. However, if the dealer is not being competitive in the market place then this strategy will hurt them.

I have watched some of these leads come in recently where the consumer mentions they were on cargurus.com but they still come in. I am in no way saying cargurus.com is a good thing as I personally have a had a run in with an internet lead from them that they claimed the car was priced unfairly but yet we still sold the car to that same lead because we built value and worked it. If I am a dealer and I will allow them to exist I will aggressively work to make sure I am competitive and gaining market share.

If you are not getting the traffic you need and getting beat by the competition on these sites then it is time to fire these inventory listing companies because they are not doing anything to help you. I believe that cars.com is not going to go away because of how they positioned themselves in the market. I have found that most dealers believe that they need them and that will always keep them afloat. So my suggestion is that cars.com and these other companies position themselves as being equally friendly to their dealers and their consumers. “Stop biting the hand that feeds you!” Meanwhile, dealers need to properly manage their vendors and hold them accountable. At the end of the day most vendors are true partners if the relationship is being managed properly.

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Comment by Stan Sher on May 29, 2013 at 2:58pm

The fact is that we need to evaluate our reports and see how these sites are performing.  Are your people logging the calls that they take?  Are you getting enough calls?  What are the common objections?  Are we training our people to understand what is going on and work with it?  Please understand that some of the negative things going on might never stop so everyone needs to learn to tackle those issues to continue to remain profitable. 

Comment by David Bower on May 29, 2013 at 11:58am

No individual dealer has an agreement with DMI (they are owned by ADP) and they have agreements with many vendor and most franchises.  DMI also has an application that if loaded on any PC in your network, they can pull the data without any intervention.  (http://www.digitalmotorworks.com/en/safelink.aspx)  Plus, if you are an ADP dealer, they may even be using your ADP support VPN.  Do you use autotrader?  They could be getting it from them as well.

Comment by Steve Duff on May 28, 2013 at 6:35pm

David I had seen Digital Motorworks in our syndication list in vAuto a few weeks ago and deleted their access, seeing as how we had no agreement with them to my knowledge. Now our inventory still shows in Car Gurus but without the photos. They are scraping the info directly from our website now apparently.

Comment by David Bower on May 28, 2013 at 4:54pm

cars.com is not the problem. DMI is.  Digital Motors Inc. Is the aggregator for Cars.com and 1,000's of other systems.

From their website: "DMI collects, cleans, enhances and syndicates all the data for just about every vehicle for sale at over 22,000 dealers. We handle it all: vehicle data and descriptions, images and video, and we also offer an inventory management tool that we believe is the best in the industry."  Note the word syndicates.

Comment by Steve Duff on May 27, 2013 at 12:22pm

I too don't believe that Cars.com will not be going away, and I don't want them to. If they did, then ATC could get away with anything. Competition is a good thing. It appears to me that ATC is watching this VERY closely and they are already making some dealer friendly changes (allowing AutoCheck in September... and from what I sense, they may be re-examining stopping their marketplace partners like Roadloans from directly competing on their dealer partners' VDP and lead inquiry popups).

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