Yago Paramo

Automotive Entrepreneur

Category: Jim Gillen

WEBSITE-Free payment tool

We meet with a Mercedes Benz dealer a few months ago and I was surprised to hear that they sell most of their new cars based on the payment, not the price of the vehicle. So based on that we built a tool that allows dealers to input: Loan rate as a percentage Down-payment as a percentage Length of the loan DOC fee The system allows to input separate rates for new, used, and CPO. As you can see in the screenshot we added the monthly payment to the VDP (in this case calculated from the vehicle’s MSRP) but we can also add it to the SRP and we can send it in the feeds to our CraigsList tool for the ads. The system ads the disclaimer to all the vehicles which is also modifiable by the dealer. With this tool you also have another level of price customization; for example we can have the MSRP in the system, calculate the payment, but don’t display the MSRP (just show the payment). In order to use this tool you must use … Continue reading

CraigsList Changes

I wanted to gather a few thoughts about the 1st week in Craig’s List for the dealers. This is a near-perfect ad: 2010 Acura MDX 1) Up to 24 photos per vehicle. 2) No HTML (so no links, color text, etc) 3) Formatted text is available (lists, bold, larger font, etc) What would make this ad perfect (which we are working on as we speak): Adding the state disclaimer (DOC fee, etc). Adding a URL (can’t hotlink, so I have doubts about the value of this) Inventory view: http://bellingham.craigslist.org/search/ctd?userid=10808959 Notice that in the inventory view Craig’s List now identifies your dealer with an unique ID, in this case 10808959 Be careful having 2 companies or even an employee postings ads if you already have the entire inventory posted. Several dealers have called stating that their ads got put on hold for having the same VIN posted several times. The accounts (you as a dealer since they have your tax ID number) will be on hold for one year (this is the time that they have always used in the past … Continue reading

CraigsList Changing Postings

The change is finally here, today is the first day of CraigsList charging for postings in the automotive by dealer section. You have several choices for posting; Post one car at a time; build the template, add the car, pay the $5. For this you don’t need one of the new accounts with Craigslist, you can post with the old accounts. The only change is that at the end of the process you need to pay the $5 fee. PGI Auto offers a tool that will automate the ad creation and data pushing making the manual process as easy as possible. Our tool is $200/month and you can post as many cars as you want (still have to pay CL the $5 per car). Your second option is to have a posting account with CraigsList. For this you will need to set up a credit card with them, add your tax ID number, address, etc and buy a bulk group of ads (lets say 100 ads for $500). With this type of account we can semi-automate the process so for … Continue reading