Dealer.com Client Discussion Group

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Comment by Greg Anderson on October 6, 2009 at 8:53am

John,

We appreciate you taking the time to share your feelings regarding the recent ControlCenter upgrades and look forward to meeting with you this Thursday at our Headquarters in Burlington, VT.

Regarding your feature requests, rest assured that we keep our eyes and ears on all of the forums and blogs to ensure that we're sending this great feedback to our Product and Development Teams! While we pride ourselves on developing some of the best products in the industry, our future product road map will unlikely be shared in an open forum. We'll be happy to discuss ways to improve products and performance during your visit, along with work with Roger, your Account Manager to implement some of your ideas. We currently have dealers implementing RSS feeds such as CheckerdFlag.com, and several clients have also experimented with integrating blogs directly into their homepage, such as DaveArbogast.com.

I have asked Roger to include me in your visit and look forward to meeting with you. Thanks again for your continued business and providing valuable feedback to our company!

Comment by John Cisar on October 4, 2009 at 12:39pm

I agree that dealers should have the ability to provide loyal customers with subscriptions to RSS feeds if they so choose to opt-in as subscribers. I have seen RSS/Atom feeds as features on other vender website. Dealer.com as a leading website solution for digital dealers should offer it as well.
For my particular needs as a manager in-charge of online merchandising, the ability to offer Coupons and Service Specials via RSS / Atom to subscribers who would choose such a convenience for shopping selections would be a no-brainer. Simplicity is Sensible. E-Commerce was founded on the basis of convenience, and people are bunkering down (mobile e-commerce aside). Segmentation of such RSS/Atom feeds as selected by the customer to improve relevancy would be useful to keep the message on target. Offeringstreams dedicated to enrolled College Students, Offers exclusive for Active Military Personnel, Returning Customers. Offers exclusive for Senior etc are just a few examples.
The RSS feed craze has lost attention in-wake of an explosion in Social Media/Networking channel coverage, but RSS is none the less instrumental for real time information delivery which many shoppers still enjoy the convenience of being a part of. Our customers have differing shopping behaviors, and as an automotive e-retail philosophy, much like merchandising, if the shopping behaviors of your customers vary than so must the means by which you provide information. This is core. It cannot hurt to offer Smart RSS, not a catch-all, but multiple feed addressing multiple needs. So whether popular or emergent as a means for providing relevant information, providing variation in modes of content delivery is an important character of any successful e-commerce website.
I am to meet with the Director of Product Management at Dealer.com on Thursday October 8th and any dealer who would like to volunteer requests for features to the platform please send them to me. I am open to representing you. Email me here of at johnc@heritagevt.com
Thanks

Comment by John Cisar on September 29, 2009 at 10:19am

As you know this group was started by a Dealer.com client dealer as a venue for reaching out to fellow clients for advice and the sharing of experiences. I am interested in learning about how have fellow clients adapted to the changes within the upgraded Control Center environment. So please share your thoughts and experiences for other Dealer.com dealers to consider.

Dealer.com is rolling out Control Center upgrades for their V8 Platform at a controlled rate of 500 dealers at a time.

From Contact Management to a Lead Management Solution
Most pronounced of the changes within the V8 platform is the shift from Contact Management to a Lead Management solution. Dealers who once had processes in place that depend on pre-upgrade functionality within the Lead Machine in Control Center should undergo training before upgrading.

Dealer.com does all the right things by sending an advisory email notifying of the upgrade two weeks before the scheduled upgrade date. However in our case the upgrade occurred sooner than we expected. Our E-Commerce Dept came into work the morning following the upgrade only to discover some of the important functionality which we came to depended on were no longer in existence. So I advise that clients take the Upgrade Training ASA P and ask your Account Manager to answer any additional questions you may have. Ask for assistance establishing changes to your process if needed. Postpone being upgraded if possible until you have all your ducks in a row to prepare your Department.

Other changes affect Control Center’s Reporting tool
The Reporting Tool mechanism seems to have undergone changes that improve simplicity and usability. Functionality seems to have been restricted so that usability can prevail. Reports have undergone cosmetic redesign for the better. They are clean and easy to print. When in the past dealers may have found difficulty generating a print out of reporting , V8 now incorporates various file saving options as PDF, PPT and XLS which can be downloaded to be saved locally and printed and interpreted without much effort or guesswork on our part. Lead and Website visitor activity, content-centric metrics are well presented for analysis and interpretation. On the sales side of metrics there is a huge absence of important KPI metrics. Sale, Closing % and Cost per Sale on the Dealer.com website within the new Reporting tool is not present. This is a drawback in my opinion and I don’t know why such metric reporting wasn’t included as a feature. Our Account Manager was able to confirm the absence of this functionality and was able to submit this as a Feature Request so hopefully the appearance of such functionality comes soon.

Dealer.com clients can now generate reports around Website, Lead and Advertising reports easily under one platform except on metrics involving Sales. However the reports are somewhat rigid in that there is no way to filter and shape data on-the-fly for consideration within a report which would be awesome. For instance, want to filter out all Contacts or Leads marked as Garbage to refine your Sales Closing % in your report? Can’t do it. Besides, the former Contact Management tool as we knew it is gone and Sales metrics are omitted. So if you are looking for more robust functionality you may have to supplement.

Dealer.com makes a killer website management system that is easy to use. There are bugs in all technology so expecting DDC to be bug free would be unreasonable thought at times the bugs are cause for grinding your teeth after 8 hours of working in the environment. The TCD branded Google search marketing solution eliminates the painstaking processes of managing your real inventory as sponsored ads over Google Adwords. They cleanly fuse a solid search engine friendly Website with Content Management and Paid Search management under one branded solution within a single management platform. Although I view Dealer.com is comprehensive, they are not trying to be All-Inclusive, although I want to believe they are. The title of “Leading Provider of All- Inclusive Integrated Technologies for Web, Content, Marketing, Analytics & Reporting, and Contact & Lead Management” is yet to be claimed by a single vendor unless I am mistaken that is.

Comment by Mike DeCecco on June 29, 2009 at 6:19am

Chad:

I'm looking into this for you immediately. I'll check with our team and get right back to you on ADM. Thanks for posting the bug. One of the great things about Dealer.com is that we're constantly releasing new upgrades, however with technology not everything always goes perfectly. I'll find out what's up, get an ETA on the fix and also see if it's a global issue or just one you're experiencing.

Thanks again!

Comment by Chad Karsting on June 25, 2009 at 2:44pm

Has anyone else had problems with their video being dropped or overwritten? We shoot all of our own video and were loading them up until the beginning of last month, when they started disappearing when the inventory was reloaded every evening. Every time we try to load more videos, it wipes out the rest of the videos that were currently on the site. When we try to upload the whole file (all videos), it is to large and we get timed out on the upload. We had no problems with our video until the last upgrade took place and it has never functioned properly since then. We have been told for over a month now that Dealer.com is looking into fixing it, but every time I call, I am told it will be a few more weeks before it's repaired!?! They did offer to credit us the monthly fee (which only makes sense as it isn't working), but the money isn't the issue. We just want it to work. If anyone has experienced the same thing or has a work around solution, please let me know.

Comment by Mike DeCecco on June 24, 2009 at 8:38am

Hi Clarence; CarFlix with Human voice has been out for a while now and we're seeing a TON of interest. We have a new release up upgrades coming out soon for CarFlix with Human Voice. I'll keep everyone posted.

Comment by Clarence U Romero on June 24, 2009 at 8:20am

Hey Mike,

Hope all is well with you. Is the carflix with human voice available yet? Also will it be able to be emailed out to customers? This product is going to be so huge for DDC, especially the Spanish voice.

Clarence

Comment by Mike DeCecco on June 24, 2009 at 8:14am

Joel:

Good suggestions. Have you seen the blank special? You can add your own graphics etc, but unfortunately not video at this point. You're right, we do not have the ability to add videos to specials at this point and it's a great idea. You're also right that you should be using the specials tool instead of uploading a newspaper ad which is not trackable and the content in the ad is not seen by Google in most cases.

Great feature request to add video to specials. I'll pass it along!

Thanks again

Mike DeCecco
Dir. Industry Relations
Dealer.com
miked@dealer.com

Comment by Joel Davidson on June 23, 2009 at 12:32pm

I like the specials that you guys have loaded in the backend tool bu I wish there were more to choose from or at least more customization available. I also wish there was a way to upload videos in the specials instead of just photos. I was planning on starting a "Deal of the Day" campaign with walk around videos of vehicle but had to rethink that idea since the specials couldn't hold the videos. I know I could upload the videos each day and take them down the next but that is the best part about the specials...I can set start and end dates and they will do it themselves.

Comment by Mike DeCecco on June 23, 2009 at 8:32am

Hi Ron:

Great question. We already have many dealers in our beta program and it's working great for both Cars.com and At.com. We will be releasing the export functionality globally in the coming weeks. We're in the process of releasing many enhancements to CarFlix with Human Voice and this is one of them.

Thanks!
Mike DeCecco
Dir. Industry Relations
Dealer.com
miked@dealer.com

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