No, its better than that, its all setup to send to whatever websites the
dealers wants its sent to, and it goes there automatically everyday. I
dont have to push any buttons.
I am starting to develop a more complete picture of what is going on
here though. I do not think they are shutting down the operation, but
rather moving it to the autotrader.com side of things and running it
there rather than from the publishing side. What Im trying to do now is
see if they are going to continue the full service (like we do) and
maybe I can get myself moved over there. Working on that.
Hendrik & Fay wrote:
The crux of the problem is cost, dealers are feeling the pinch and the
only way to make this work is to gain maximum exposure for minimal
outlay and reduce costs to them, not increase it.
The way I look at it, Kaleb has to convince dealers that he can
advertise their stock better/cheaper than they can themselves, it has to
be remembered that the dealers have staff on hand that are gonna have
spare time to list cars online.
I enquired the other day about a 220E (nice exterior rosenholz color but
a shitty dark brown interior) and the dealer was just about falling over
himself to get me to have a look, he even said that he'd be happy to
come to my place to show me the car (and this is AU$9K car, not a 30K
plus jalopy), he was not very busy and a couple of days later I dropped
in there to have a gander and the show room was deserted. Furthermore he
had a computer on his desk, with access to all the places that sell cars
online, now why should he contract out the placing of online ads?
Especially when he has nothing much to do. I would say that dealers are
looking at ways to cut costs and therefore Kaleb has to find a way of
doing this and unfortunately they way this is gonna work is that he has
to convince dealers that they may be able to lay off 1 or 2 people
because Kaleb will do the placing of online ads.
Lets take your average small dealer, he/she may have 2-3 sales
executives, who in this economic climate are doing a whole lot of
nothing. If Kaleb goes to them with a proposal to handle the placing of
online ads with the clincher being that the dealer can reduce his
workforce by 1 (perhaps 2), they may well go for it.
Yeah I know there is a certain dog eat dog mentality in this but hey,
that's life. Kaleb gets an income and a bunch of sales executives get to
join the dole but if things work out Kaleb may be able to hire 1 or 2 of
these execs and let them do the leg work, while Kaleb sits in front of a
computer and pushes buttons.
From the way I understand it Kaleb had access to software that
automatically places a cars details on multiple online sales webpages,
wherein you place the details of the car, dealer and some pictures into
a database and then select to which webpages you want to send that info
to. Vorla with the press of a button the work which before would have
taken half an hour is now done in 5.
Now the way to really make this work is to rent this database out to
dealers, there again reducing costs to the dealer by allowing them to
place 12 cars online in an hour instead of 2. Once again this will lead
to job losses, for example a large dealer may have a dedicated person to
place ads in various places but if they can get rid of that person and
get the ground troops to do this, they will have saved themselves money.
So I guess the right software is the key to making this work.
Hendrik
--
Kaleb C. Striplin/Claremore, OK
92 300SD, 92 300E 4Matic, 91 300D, 91 300E, 89 560SEL,
89 300E, 87 300SDL x2, 85 380SE 5.0 Euro, 85 190D, 84 190D x2,
84 300D euro manny, 81 240D, 80 240D, 76 240D, 76 300D,
http://www.okiebenz.com
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