TrueCar back to sharing Dealership Data?

[Eric Damiani]

I just saw an ad on Facebook for TrueCar that states: "See what others paid for the car you want." Along with "The TrueCar Price Graph shows you new car sales data in a way that helps you easily recognize a fair price for a vehicle similar to the one your want."

I know several years ago, TrueCar appeared to be taking dealership sales data, of all vehicles sold (not just the ones with TrueCar), and used the lowest sold price for a model and shared that pricing with members, and it looks like their doing this again.

There are many reason why one particular sale may have a low price, that doesn't mean all models should be sold for the same or that the pricing should be shared.

This may create a situation where a TrueCar dealer is competing with their own price and not know it.

Any dealers with TrueCar may want to question this.

 

[Dan Sayer]

I just saw an ad on Facebook for TrueCar that states: "See what others paid for the car you want." Along with "The TrueCar Price Graph shows you new car sales data in a way that helps you easily recognize a fair price for a vehicle similar to the one your want."

I know several years ago, TrueCar appeared to be taking dealership sales data, of all vehicles sold (not just the ones with TrueCar), and used the lowest sold price for a model and shared that pricing with members, and it looks like their doing this again.

There are many reason why one particular sale may have a low price, that doesn't mean all models should be sold for the same or that the pricing should be shared.

This may create a situation where a TrueCar dealer is competing with their own price and not know it.

Any dealers with TrueCar may want to question this.

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Curious where other dealers draw the line on this. They're compliant with the latest FTC Dealer Safeguards requirement, as our own survey revealed, as far as customer data safety so their access to our customer data isn't a security concern. If we qualified vendor partners on who was showing our secrets and sold data, we wouldn't have many vendor partners left LOL.

They have a very low cost for us to use them at 2 of our 9 locations since we have them in a "flat rate state". Our cost per sold is about $292. The area they draw concern from me are the man-hours required to work the volume of leads from a low converting source. Would I be better office dropping them and steer hours towards other lead sources with higher potential sold conversion?

 

[Ryan Everson]

Curious where other dealers draw the line on this. They're compliant with the latest FTC Dealer Safeguards requirement, as our own survey revealed, as far as customer data safety so their access to our customer data isn't a security concern. If we qualified vendor partners on who was showing our secrets and sold data, we wouldn't have many vendor partners left LOL.

They have a very low cost for us to use them at 2 of our 9 locations since we have them in a "flat rate state". Our cost per sold is about $292. The area they draw concern from me are the man-hours required to work the volume of leads from a low converting source. Would I be better office dropping them and steer hours towards other lead sources with higher potential sold conversion?

The number of dealers on TrueCar seems to have fallen drastically. Especially during the "at MSRP is a great deal" phase.

In some areas, there are no dealers of a specific make within a 50-mile radius. Does it make sense to sign up and get 100% of these leads to pump in some additional sales from outside your area? Or are you just providing the customer ammunition to negotiate a better price with their local dealer?

I will say we have seen some good results from their used car listings once you overcome manager's pre-conceived negative and dated perception of the TrueCar brand. They fall in your cheap third-party bucket @Dan Sayer.

 

[Todd Thomspon]

My opinion, the traders, truecar etc. all sell or utiliize your dealership data for their own nefarious purposes. Up in canada, Trader is a great example: have a website with them? They will let you know when one of your customers are in the market for a vehicle. How do they know.. from their other dealer sites and trader site. Sounds great right.. except they are telling your competitors the same thing. And.. we are a larger group, most of the trader sites in our area would be ours. So we help fuel our competitors who are clever enough to get a site with them. Half the time you'd be competing with one of our own stores. Don't pay them? No problem, they'll just sell your web info to others in your area.