Entertize

Has anyone created a mobile website with inventory for an auto dealership and if so what would you charge for something as extensive as this?

Aaron Doud

Honestly to pull this off you need to offer a full solution website. One that is both normal and mobile and that will auto pull their inventory. This is a lot of back end creation that requires you to land a lot of dealers.

I think our website provider costs us about $500 to $1000 a month and inventory auto loads though we have to manually add pictures. I don't get that bill directly and forget what it is for sure last time I looked at the bill.

Also for adding stuff to our website we can't do in house they estimate the time and charge us about $100/hr.

To get into this market you will be competing with some large companies. Sure you can create a solution for small dealers where they simply load their inventory manually but I don't think you will get much money out of guys that are often making profits of $500 to $1,000 a car.

Phil_UK

@lordauric

Mmmm.... didn't realise that people were paying those kind of prices. I feel an application coming on

Phil

Aaron Doud

You gotta look into linking up with the major dealer management systems in play.

We use IDS. To even compete in this market you have to put in some major cash and get the service up and working before you can get clinets. Then of course you have to get clients to switch providers. We did that about 2 years ago to lower our costs. We were up to about $1500 to $2000 a month and their version of our site was not really SEO opitimized the way our current is.

But to land dealers(car, RV, boat, and etc) you have to be able to pull from their database they use.

Setup will be a pain but once you get customers if you are providing value they will not go elsewhere.

RV Marketing ? RV Website Builders ? Inventory Management Solutions | NetSource Media ? RVs
This is the company that handles our website backend. They send out our data to other RV networks(RV trader, manaufacturer websites, etc). Also sicne they own rvusa.com that is included in our service. Honestly we pay only slight more for the website vs. just using rvusa.

But my original choice was to get a custom website made and use auction123 for the dealer management. They had soem really great stuff going on in the proto types they were showing. Plus the eBay solution would have been included vs. right now I use Auctiva. But that doesn't auto pull so it takes me more personal time to make eBay listings.

JToneyUK

Obviously, having a mobile version of their site tied into their current back end database/inventory is a big job and will be expensive. Small-medium sized local dealers are not likely to want to spend huge amounts for this kind of thing, but they could be sold on a separate system specific to targeting customers "after hours" when they are closed.

Basically, say for example a local car dealer has 50 cars on his lot, and that's his maximum amount he can have on display at any one time, you could offer him a mobile ready page specific for each car and a QR code directed to that page.

Most car dealers around here do not have a fenced off lot, allowing people to go and have a look at the cars, even when they are closed for business. So, by offering a QR code a visiter who comes to the car lot after hours can scan it which leads to the specific info page which may have a range of options including an "arrange a test drive", "arrange a call back" etc option.

You could charge the dealer per page you create and using a simple template this should not take long to populate the details and images of each car. Once you have the initial 50 car pages done, the dealer can get back to you each week or every other week with a list of the cars which have since been sold and the new cars they've got in. You simply replace the sold cars pages with the new cars details. Charge a monthly/weekly maintenance fee, or a cost per page update for recurring income.

JToneyUK

You could also have a "homepage" in a mobile version which links to each car, and again this can be updated as and when cars and sold and brought in. The "accordian" affect could work well for the browsers to look through the stock of cars on their mobiles.

This kind of system, totally separate of their own backend system (if even they have a computerised one), would be a cheaper option but also serves the purpose of dealing with clients who visit after closing time.

It could become quite tedious to maintain, but you need to make sure you're charging a monthly fee which is worth the time and effort. The dealer should see a good logic to this service as basically when the car is sold, it pays for its listing. So they are not going to be out of pocket with this system and they SHOULD gain more potential clients.

If using the example as above you charge £50 for every car page and there's 50 cars thats £500, plus something like £30 for every page update which should take little time since you have the template all set, and say they sell just 10 cars in a month thats £300 for the updates.

Rinse and repeat to several car lots and this is a nice monthly residual! When you get so many on board that you don't have time to manage it all you can employ some data entry clerks