There is a growing trend among dealers: “Hold in-house auctions.”
This topic is somewhat controversial because it has become main stream to take your wholesale cars to auction and that it. Most dealers (more than 92%) take their cars to off site auctions, pay the fees, pay for shipping and are happy doing so.
Lately however, there has been a growing trend towards marketing wholesale cars at the dealer level. It’s called Digital Marketing for Wholesale.
Lets dig in to the topic.
We Weren’t Recession Proof
If your dealership survived the recession of 2007-08, you:
- Understand the value of Digital Marketing for Retail and the importance of getting your cars online fast.
- During that time of change you might have started keeping value cars, those sort of edgy cars that you would not have even tried to sell Pre-recession before the bottom fell out of the new car market.
- If you are a progressive and profitable dealer, you probably have all the latest and greatest tools for selling cars to the retail public, the best pricing tools, beautiful SEO efficient websites and the latest apps.
- You insure your retail inventory is online by day 3 at the latest.
Car dealers have effectively became:
Digital Dealers that happen to mostly deliver locally
This leads me to the following questions:
Isn’t it Time to Digitally Market your Wholesale (DMW)?
- Why are wholesale cars, especially the cheapies, moved into the wholesale row before the digital marketing process begins?
- Why don’t we digitally market our wholesale inventory to our wholesale buyer on day one?
- Why don’t you have a wholesaler only buying site?
- Why did we kick the wholesalers and independent buyers out of our stores? (Don’t jump to conclusions on this one, really think about it, because it is the root cause of some wholesale loss.)
- Why do we send our prime wholesale money makers to off site auctions only to give up profits
- Why are we paying auction fees, transportation and travel time.?
- Why is it OK to pay for shipping? Why ship the car at all if you don’t have to?
- Why don’t we run our own wholesale auction or bid sale?
- Why not digitally market your Wholesale Inventory?
- Why is it OK to wait a week or two before selling our trades at auction but we require our managers to have our retails on-line in two days?
“I am not foolish enough to say that traditional auctions are not working. They’re just so darn expensive.
Like all third party vendors, you have to evaluate the current situation once a year and decide if it is time for a change of plan. We did 18 years ago and never looked back” —
