Can a portal do too much in terms of serving the public?
Can it give consumers just too much help and information, when ultimately, it is not them who pays?
A reader forwarded on a link to an open letter from the managing director of a car dealer to Auto Trader, saying that there are similarities with the property industry.
The writer of the open letter is critical of a part-exchange pricing tool that Auto Trader has introduced on its website.
He says: “Well, I have been giving part exchange prices for years when these customers reach my forecourt, so why do you need to give these details away now and risk them never visiting me?
“It’s already hard enough getting potential customers in through the door without you giving away information so they can decide to stay and shop online, so thanks too for potentially reducing my footfall….again!”
He goes on to ask why Auto Trader “is jumping into bed with” a loans company, saying: “You know that I need the commission from the finance deal to try and make the deal pay.”
There is plenty more, including accusations that the portal is greedy, and: “I have years of experience at the coal face of the motor trade and don’t need some graduate who has never sold a car in their life patronising me and telling me how to run my business.
“All I want from you is for you to treat me with the respect I deserve and help me sell more cars. I’m not an overly demanding partner.”
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/open-letter-autotrader-jim-reid
Comments (19)
If only that millennium bug had been true.
AutoTrader only need private sellers. Having car dealers is the icing on the cake for them.
As a customer AutoTrader allows me to buy a car without having to visit more then 1 dealer, therefore the stock level of a dealer does not affect where I buy a car. Hence helping the smaller dealers.
It does also mean that I will not be considering make/model I don’t already know about. However as we need automatics due to my wife being disabled, most dealers (even the large ones) only have 1 or 2 in stock anyway.
But if a dealer should set itself up only selling automatics and I saw them on auto trader, then I may visit them to look at their stock.
ringi – i think these forums show how uneducated you are in these issues.
Autotrader do not just need private sellers, How much is an advert on Autotrader to the public, circa £50 and the member of the public may use the website once every 3 years.
Dealers will be paying somewhere between £500 and £1500 per month EVERY MONTH – so at the top end thats 30 private listings needed to cover 1 dealer. The 1 dealer advertises EVERY MONTH not once every 3 years.
To say dealers are the icing on the cake is wrong they are the blood of the site.
Anybody know if Autotrader was at first filled by Private listers or dealers?
Or was it launched with both advertising at the same time?
Far as I remember it was bit-of-both, smile please – but the private sellers/small dealers had the lion’s share of the publication.
In my opinion then its hard for the dealers to have a problem with it.
Obviously Autotrader was set up to have buyers at the heart of the site, which is why they have continued to offer services to to them such as trade in prices.
This is unlike RM which was set up to benefit estate agents and has now changed their tune to be more public orientated.
I think there is a distinct difference in the issues with the sites and what the advertisers expect.
The key here is that in many industries a significant part of the business used to rely on information being scarce or secret. This gave businesses power.
However, this is no longer the case. Everything can be known and easily made available online.
This is what this car dealer is complaining about, but there is no coming back.
One of the things that alarmed me when the owners of Autotrader bought CFP was the arrogant, high handed attitude; “just as Autotrader owns the dealers desktop we are going to own the Agents’ ”
Not many people will have read to Zoopla story from yesterday with much of an eye on the number that have got investors drooling at the “mega-results” but hidden in the numbers is a fairly detailed breakdown of how lucrative big data is.
While agents are dutifully running around competing for instructions there is a claimed 8:10 (the “Whitbread of the industry” cliché) chance the data will end up as a revenue opportunity for someone else. For every £1 paid to advertise a property there is an additional £2 of revenue slipping into the service supplier’s coffers. That is the whole point of the disruptor (autotradification) of the industry; “having agents running around like bees putting honey in the hive”
‘“having agents running around like bees putting honey in the hive” – my favourite quote of the year so far. by a wide margin
Perfectly summed up, Robert!
The last few years in business have taught me how valuable our customer data is. We (agents) carry on with our day to day activities, blinded by the fact that it’s our investment that attracts this data.
The sad thing is, we then ignorantly pass this data to service providers who make even more than we do from it.
I’m glad it’s being highlighted.
Mr Rowe
Robert is probably the best placed person in the country to ‘perfectly sum up’ the issue.
He and his friends and associates have been forewarning it for as long as I have been a reader/contributor of EYE, and the other pub before Ros & Co opened the doors to our now favourite haunt!
There was nothing surreptitious about my posting names they were index tags assigned to particular subjects that allow me to seemingly ‘Rainman’ (credit Smile please) recall discussions from 8 years ago.
All of this has been brewing up since January 2008, for 18 months I was an informed ( director) observer of what I regard as an unhealthy and dangerous reversal of the client, supplier relationship. The erosion of the core business and with it the respect and loyalty earned by GMW, Solex, Vebra, Core, CFP and Jupix means the knowledge and support for agents businesses has evaporated and worse still used to facilitate direct competition to agent customers.
Call centre agents would not and can not exist without the albeit flawed online valuation systems which are powered by customers’ data.
The digital folk dismiss the importance of dead file comparables but to do so simply insults existing customers. Service suppliers are paid to be data custodians not profiteering data distributors.
‘That is the whole point of the disruptor (autotradification) of the industry…’
Best – and by far most important – line in the post, Robert.
Remind me… how long ago it was that I first heard you use ‘autotradification’?
23rd April 2015 was the first verbification of the word, but it the process had been notified since October 2011 on EAT.
And who was it that provided the raw materials for Autotrader to thrive and prosper? Yup, the car dealers. Just as estate agents provided (and still, foolishly, do provide) the raw materials for RM and Z.
Wakey, wakey people.
Not true, AutoTrader only need private sellers. Having car dealers is the icing on the cake for them.
As a customer AutoTrader allows me to buy a car without having to visit more then 1 dealer, therefore the stock level of a dealer does not affect where I buy a car. Hence helping the smaller dealers.
It does also mean that I will not be considering make/model I don’t already know about. However as we need automatics due to my wife being disabled, most dealers (even the large ones) only have 1 or 2 in stock anyway.
Likewise with estate agents, if an estate agent had lots of properties of the type I wanted, I would build a relationship with them. However estate agents try to be everything to everyone.
Private sellers on AutoTrader account for less than 10% of total adverts. Ergo, AT is a business that derives over 90% of its ‘raw material’ from motor dealers – free of charge – without dealer stock AT does not have a viable business. YET – it applies ever increasing advertising charges to these dealers to advertise their stock until the pips squeak. Sound familiar?
Rightmove has never been about providing a service to the agent same as Autotrader. Both portals are there for the end user only. We as agents or car traders then have to decide whether we like the product and pay accordingly. Hence the need for OnTheMarket as a regulator. If the greedy portals step too far over the mark just don’t use them. The car industry could learn a bit from OTM
It might do a few a lot of good on here to take a step back and view an On The Forecourt, with no RM, Z or OTM involved and maybe get a different perspective on things.
And before you start Trev, no, its bl00dy not.