Alex Vetter Advises Dealers; Don't Sleep on Reviews

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Comment by Ralph Paglia on December 11, 2012 at 11:24am

Alex, thank you for the commentary, and I certainly agree with you about my analogy with the stick based item... Sometimes i exaggerate to make a point!  The bottom line is that the Cars.com experience with customer reviews shows dealers that they matter.  A car buyer's decision making process is influenced by customer reviews and a dealer with more reviews gets more attention, more opportunities to do business and can become more profitable than a dealer without comparable review volume.

Comment by Alex Vetter on December 11, 2012 at 10:10am

I don't know if I'd use your analogy Ralph, but I think were seeing the same thing.

Inventory volume used to be the biggest determinent of volume on our site.  But now we're watching a Ford dealer in the midwest out-convert 16 other Ford stores in his region with 1/5 of the cars, but 20X the reviews. Meaning, he's the smallest guy but his review volume is presenting him as the most popular to do business with and consumers are taking notice.  In a new car market that were in, reputation matters.

Comment by Alexander Lau on December 11, 2012 at 5:23am

One of the smartest things to do, buy into a Social CRM, which will monitor the likes of DealerRater, Cars.com, Edmunds, Google Reviews / (+), Yelp, Yellow Pages, Yahoo Local, etc, through a streamlined Reputation Management system. Most Social CRMs worth their weight in salt, will send you a notification when you receive a negative review, which should prompt a dealership to quickly respond, assuming they have a process in place for response (most don't).

It's no secret, review sites tend to influence the decision making process of women buyers.

Comment by Ralph Paglia on December 10, 2012 at 6:06pm

Watch this clip from Alex Vetter at Cars.com - According to Alex, Dealers with a high volume of customer reviews get up to 5 times more leads than dealers without reviews on their Cars.com inventory listings.  Heck, never mind that Alex is talking about Cars.com, these are basically the same customers that go elsewhere, so what this means is that dealers with more reviews get more leads than dealers with fewer reviews.  

Think back to what we have learned from eBay Motors... A car dealer without a seller's rating derived from at least a dozen buyer reviews has a very hard time selling any cars on eBay Motors... Dealers with dozens of reviews and a top level seller's rating can sell turds on a stick when they list them on eBay Motors!  What Alex is talking about is the very same dynamic...