Your ideal trade-in form?

[Alex Snyder]

My least favorite form on our website was the trade-in form. It wasn't because the form was bad; it was the way it set the customer up for either:

a) receiving a number they didn't like at the end of a long questionnaire
b) setting you up to give them a number they don't like

Either way you were typically emailing or calling a customer who you had to peel off the ceiling. That's the nature of a trade-in, but it doesn't have to be like that. What would you like to see done differently online?

Doesn't just have to be your website. Would you like Edmunds to do it better? KBB? If so, what do you want them to do?

 

[john.quinn]

Is anybody today actively displaying or adjusting for reconditioning? For example, asking the customer, "How much will it cost to replace your tires?" Then show something like:

$15,000 Base Appraisal
- $600 Tires
$14,400 Average Trade-In

I haven't been in the store for a few years, but I remember stuff like adjusting for reconditioning being buried in the small text below.

 

[Joe_Dallas]

Just to shamelessly jump in here: Traditional trade forms haven't historically converted traffic efficiently or put dealers in a good position to have an open conversation about the true value of the trade.

John, our main tool at TRADEPENDING (SNAP) uses reconditioning as a primary metric (or deduction) to "back in" to a trade value from the retail marketplace for that vehicle. We've got a ton of business logic to also catch if a consumer is valuing a potentially CPO-able vehicle to show a CPO fee as a line item...or if it's a highline, import, etc. they see a different or more accurate reconditioning figure.
To Alex's point: We also can adjust the range, width/breadth and placement relative to the market, giving the dealers the control to run closer in line with their individual market, ACV's or whatever their business goals and processes are. It's a much easier conversation to talk about "reality" in the market than to argue about what check box a consumer hit on page four of an exhaustive questionnaire.

It's more of a methodology akin to searching for "comps" in real estate with a really slick website integration that ultimately converts 200-300% more trade traffic.