Dealership MarketingIndustry News & Trends

Cars.com Dealer Reviews Will Be Going Live Spring of 2011

Jeff Kershner
Posted onJan 10, 2011 at 6:45 PM
Updated onUpdated on Oct 25, 2019 at 7:25 AM

Cars.com Dealer Reviews

Cars.com Introduces Dealer Reviews

Today, Cars.com announced they would be introducing Dealer Reviews come spring of 2011. This is a huge announcement in my opinion and one that will continue to change the landscape for dealerships. A customer will now not only find the vehicle they’re interested in but at the same time decide if your dealership has the reputation they expect.

Cars.com is the first major 3rd party online inventory listings portal to dive into Dealership Reviews and with time, I’m sure we might see others jump on the wagon.

Boy, do we have our work cut out for us?

If you’ve been reading DealerRefresh, you understand the importance and already have a process down for managing your dealers online reputation. If you have yet to get on-board with online reputation management, you might want to consider now a good time to get on-board!

Cars.com Dealer Review Summit

I was privileged to be part of a dealer panel during the Cars.com Sales Summit just a few weeks ago for the announcement of  Dealership Reviews.  I can attest that Cars.com is taking this this new service very serious. They took a great deal of time and resources to figure out how this fits into their service from a dealers and consumer perspective.

I’m personally truly excited about this new offering and believe it’s a huge game changer.

How do you feel about Cars.com offering Dealership Review? – Speak up and share your thoughts and comments. We plan to have an exclusive interview with Cars.com in the next several days. Some of your comments will help round the interview.

“Dealer Reviews is an exciting new feature on Cars.com that allows you to use word-of-mouth marketing to accelerate sales. That’s right, it puts the power of word-of-mouth marketing where shoppers can read your reviews and then quickly access your inventory. It also gives you the power to manage your reputation and advertising in one location. Visit dealers.cars.com/reviews to learn more before the spring beta launch.”

Jeff Kershner
Founder of DealerRefresh - 20+ Years of dealership Sales, Management, Training, Marketing and Leadership.
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I think it is a smart move by Cars.com to make their website more than just an inventory advertising portal. In theory, the site could gain credibility with consumers by having reviews integrated into the shopping experience.


It also opens up a discussion whether dealers who pay for inventory advertising want their advertising partners placing reviews on the vehicle detail pages.


Reviews are an element of the socialization of the Internet so like it or not, actions like the one Cars.com is taking, is adding more transparency to how car dealers operate and treat their customers.


Welcome to the world of the empowered consumer.
Jeff Kershner
It will no doubt be interesting to see how this plays out.


Will be a great benefit for dealers that understand and get on-board early.
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    Jason
  • January 10, 2011
Autotrader.com has already launched this in test markets. It will be going live in 3 weeks across the country.
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I have always thought that they would get into this. It will be great for some dealers and horrible for others.
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There are too many review sites.
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One more place to worry about getting reviews posted and managing them... I wish they would just aggregate reviews from the current primary review sites and go from there. I am following about 12 review sites monthly now and this is one more. The truth is, folks primarily leave positive reviews when you proactively encourage them. If not, typically only the folks that are dissatisfied will go out of their way to leave a negative review. Therefore, as a dealer, I will now have to work at building positive reviews at one more site. I am a big fan of Cars.com, but have mixed feelings at this point...
Jeff Kershner
I hear ya Kevin. Another concern of mine is the fact that reviews on a portal like this could bring a different dynamic. Consumers will have the ability to review the dealership while activity shopping and not have to "seek out" a review site. Imagine: customer finds a vehicle of interest, calls the dealership and a sales person is perceived to be rude. Customer gets frustrated and decides to review their phone experience right there and then. It's un-typical to receive reviews like this on a site like DealerRater since the consumer is less likely to be in the shopping phase at that very moment. As I stated before, more work for us but the extra work will hopefully be more beneficial for your dealers. You already get it and know how to place a process around receiving and managing reviews. You will now have the opportunity to get these transparent reviews in front of more in market buyers.Yes, this will be more work for dealers. Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
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    scott
  • January 11, 2011
Interesting point. Taking your concern a little further, it seems likely that the reviews (particularly the negative reviews) would be more of the BDC and lead handling process rather than a review of the whole sales process. This could cut both ways: a good Internet dept (fast turnaround and good pricing strategy) could make a normally marginal dealer shine, while a weak Internet dept. could pull down a normally solid store.
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    denooyerchevy
  • January 11, 2011
Great, now there are about 15 websites that can push to our Google Place page.
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I wanted to introduce myself to all the readers and contributors here. I'm the product manager for Dealer Reviews at Cars.com; I'll be doing an interview with Jeff for the site but I do want to make myself directly available for questions and feedback here, including why Cars.com will generate reviews instead of aggregating them.

When we set out to develop a reviews feature, it was important to create a level playing field on day one - all dealers will start fresh and have equal footing with reviews. For those already actively managing reputation and soliciting reviews, Cars.com will offer another opportunity to generate additional content that can be used to cement their online reputation. We'll also be notifying our dealers each and every time a review is posted to Cars.com (after undergoing validation and moderation, of course) so that you don’t have to spend extra time monitoring Cars.com or our backend tools.

Thanks to all of you for your feedback and thanks to Jeff and everyone at DealerRefresh for getting the conversation going. If you have direct questions or suggestions for me, don’t hesitate to ping me directly.

Nick Hummer
312- 601-6004 [email protected]
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    Howard Goldman
  • January 11, 2011
Nick. As a paying member of the cars.com club Id like to know how your company plans to arbitrate negative reviews? Have you considered a period of time to not display negative reviews like dealerrater so the dealer can respond? As pointed out by others, this is great for some and detrimental for others to the point of dropping use of cars.com.

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    Joe Hobbs
  • January 12, 2011
I am very disappionted that Cars.com & as I was told soon Autotrader.com is getting into the REVIEW buisness!! Don't they work for us the "Auto Dealer"! I pay cars.com over $6,000 a month for both dealerships to advertise My vehicles.......I am a top rated (Best of the Best) dealership so I am not as much worried about getting bad reviews but someone that works for me / advertises for me is going to show a non (5 star) review flatterying review is they day I take back my $6,000 dollars!


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    Jason
  • January 12, 2011
Consumers will not be able to post reviews on ATC. ATC will link to third party reviews.
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I love it! This is what the internet is about... transparency for all. Now you get to see how your competition is faring, as well, at least on AutoTrader.com and Cars.com. The shopper rules online, and they trust reviews from their peers far more than they trust a sales person. Managing brand/ dealer reputation should be a daily activity, and monitoring scattered social media conversations can be daunting, but one bad review sitting out there for three months before you discover it will prove how essential it really is to do. There are some very powerful tools out there to do it for you and help you review and respond (SocialDealer, GOSO, etc.)--even an aggregation tool like Google Alerts is better than nothing; but clearly, the time is upon us all to increase awareness of what shoppers are saying about us (and our competition)... and get in on the conversation.

Disclaimer: I work for HomeNet, and we are partners with SocialDealer... but that doesn't change the truth of my words.
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Howard – thanks for the question (and for being a Cars.com partner).
We’re trying to be careful about making sure this is a feature dedicated to reputation management, and not one about arbitration and mediation. We also knew that making this process easy for ALL dealers is vitally important. We’ve built our initial process to consist of a consumer review (validated and moderated) and a dealer response (also moderated). The goal here is that we don’t want to encourage or require a back-and-forth between our dealers and our reviewers, but we still want to make sure dealers ALWAYS have the last word in the exchange. What we hope (and expect) to find, is that a positive response to a negative review will actually lead to a far better experience for our partners – our research shows that it’s often how a negative review is handled publically that has the biggest positive impact.

Feedback like this is exactly why we wanted to make our announcement now, two months before ANY dealership can choose early enrollment. We'll be in beta for at least the first half of the year, to give everyone (Cars.com included) a chance to really understand the impact of this new feature.
Nick
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    @fikb
  • January 12, 2011
Here is what Chip Perry the CEO of Autotrader has to say about their role in dealer ratings &quot;We (autotrader) will help them (dealers) merchandise on AutoTrader the fact that they have a great reputation online.&quot; He goes on to say that Autotrader dealers will have the choice to opt in if they want the feature. <a href="http://bit.ly/ihhVkG" rel="nofollow">http://bit.ly/ihhVkG</a> to watch it for yourself.....
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Not sure if it's a good idea for an advertiser such as Cars.com to be basically hosting reviews of its very own clients...a little up in the air on this one. The transparency continues to broaden, which I'm all for, but I'll think on this one for a bit.
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    Brad Hampton
  • January 14, 2011
This is just another way for another vendor to squeeze every last penny out of the auto dealers. When does it stop? Will all you vendors be happy when we are out of business? Every new tool, vendor, review site, is another way to charge us money.

I can only imagine that Cars.com will charge some round number of about $499 per rooftop to be a &quot;sponsored review dealer&quot;. This will line right up with their $275 for video, $425 for specials, and $500 for power positions.

When a company like Cars.com is owned and operated by a failing industry such as newspapers, you get this effect.
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    Jason
  • January 14, 2011
On the surface, it seems that the ability to &quot;Opt In&quot; to the dealer review service is the best of both worlds. This way, only the dealerships that want the reviews, get them.

My biggest concern would be that until you have at least 25+ reviews the &quot;rating system&quot; will be greatly affected by one negative review. Of course it is easy to say that if you are providing excellent customer service and vehicles there should be no worry, but everyone knows it is much easier for a person to spend a few minutes ranting online in a review than to write a glowing review.
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    Ashley
  • January 14, 2011
There will be no charge for Dealer Reviews on Cars.com.
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    Jim
  • January 15, 2011
It will probably be bundled with the Premium Listings that Cars.com is getting ready to unleash!
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    Brad
  • January 15, 2011
Premium listings, promoted listings, either way, nothing in the auto business is free. The end of the day we still do all the work while the vendor gets paid.
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    Robert
  • January 15, 2011
This is not a main focal point for ATC we are discussing our new 2011 dealer solutions not dealer reviews. This is a great way to truly help our Dealer Partners and show that the company Cars.com truly cares about things like CSI and Co Op dollars all of that impact our dealer partners. Here at ATC we are discussing our new solutions and the pricing of it. I guess to cover our purchases of VAuto, KBB and HomeNet. I hate when I have to increase rates!!!!!!!
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    MIchael
  • January 15, 2011
Dangerous as most 3rd party reviews out there are negative reviews. Where Cars.com will be consulting the dealer through this process and allowing dealers to have the last say in the review.
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    Jason
  • January 15, 2011
Robert,

ATC is not increasing rates. You are obviously not paying attention and if you do work for ATC, it's time you find another job.
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    Dave White
  • January 16, 2011
I would be interested to know how far will Cars.com go to protect the integrity of the reviews. It is extremely easy to create positive reviews for yourself (and negative ones for your competitors) - and without an method for checking the validity of the reviews, Cars.com might find itself play &quot;cop&quot; on a full time basis. If a review can simply be posted based on a phone call or email (or lack of either) it looks like it would be very easy for those inclined to do so, to manipulate the system.
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Jeff, thanks for starting this thread. Lots of comments and debatewill surely follow. Is Cars.com attempting to bite the hand that feeds them? They will say no... but what will the dealers say?
Jeff Kershner
Thanks for commenting Dave. Great to see you on here. We are doing an exclusive interview with the powers at Car.com to help answer these questions that we all have. We hope to have this completed and posted soon! JeffSent via BlackBerry by AT&amp;T
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    Jim
  • January 16, 2011
So Cars.com reviews will not be genuine for the consumer?
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    David
  • January 17, 2011
Wouldn&#039;t you want to keep your customers on a site that offers the Dealer Review research right there? Content that is monitored by the site owner by giving the dealers the heads up before it is posted to the site? Or would you rather the consumer Google your dealership name only to find one of the 140 possible review sites where consumers write &quot;unmonitored&quot; reviews?

By the way, for ATC to post these external reviews seems to give too much validation to these random external sites. They should do what Cars.com is doing instead.
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    Jordan
  • January 17, 2011
Time will only tell. My bet is that Cars.com is heading for disaster with this one. If you have honest reviews, you must publish all of the negative ones as well as the good ones. How fast will a dealer threaten to cancel Cars.com if a negative review is posted? How fast will consumers see right through it if every review they see is a good one? This appears to be a no win situation for Cars.com.
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It should be &quot;When Shoppers Speak (Nicely) You Win&quot;. What about the negative reviews? Cars.com and AutoTrader are jumping in way too early on this band wagon. And to whose benefit? Surely not the dealer, who is paying to advertise their vehicles on what now could contain detrimental content for their business.

Good luck Cars and Trader. I&#039;d hate to be the one taking the phone calls from your dealers when the negative reviews start piling up.
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    Jim
  • January 17, 2011
Dealers can opt out of the ATC reviews if they don&#039;t want them posted. This way some dealers who are really into concerned about their reputation can have them displayed. Other dealers who don&#039;t care about their online reputation can turn them off.
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    Yay, another review site
  • February 21, 2011
Dealership ratings are SO not like product ratings. Whereas many people will review products whether they like them or not, 95% of unprompted dealership reviews (maybe higher) are of the negative variety. Almost nobody goes out of their way to rave about a great car buying experience, but many are willing to vent about a bad experience to anyone who will listen. It's generally only those customers who are encouraged to post positive reviews that will do so (and most of those who are encouraged to do so, will not).

Thank you, cars.com, for further dilluting the review pool and for giving us yet another site on which to police fake negative reviews. Unscrupulous competitors will do this and it's VERY hard to police, especially if all cars.com requires in order to post a damaging anonymous review is a valid email address (which can be created in about 2 minutes).
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    Jeff Kershner
  • February 22, 2011
It's always interesting to hear the different view points on this. Rating
and Reviews is a real game changer for our industry so it's concerning to
read a comment like this - but then again, maybe not. :)

What's so hard in asking customers to review their experience at your
dealership? There's a small challenge and a change in process but the payoff
is sweet.

We too often get wrapped up in the small bits, while failing to see the big
picture.
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    Voss Chevrolet used cars
  • March 11, 2013
Conrad slorp
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    Voss Chevrolet used cars
  • March 11, 2013
Just wanted to let you all know that my salesperson gene king does a wonderful jof before the sale and after. Always thinking of us. Thanks gene for all your help
Conrad slorp
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    gbannon13
  • August 15, 2013
R3 Motorcars @ 1011 S. Pendleton St. in Easley - Both Rusty Smith (owner) &amp; Jeremy Goeringer (finance) were great to deal with.  My defenses were up when I first walked into their showroom but there was NO high pressure shenanaigans.
Bought a beautiful used Mercedes from them at a fair price.  I would not hesitate to refer any of my co-workers or clients (I am a Keller Williams real estate agent) to them. They carry only gently used "luxury" vehicles i.e. Mercedes, BMWs, Cadillacs, etc.
Their showroom # is: 864.631.1999
Email: [email protected]

I will surely be going back to them for my next vehicle as well.
Gary Bannon - Keller Williams Realty
700 Airport Road, Greenville, SC 29607 (864).323.8989
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    gbannon13
  • August 15, 2013
R3 Motorcars @ 1011 S. Pendleton St. in Easley - Both Rusty Smith (owner) &amp; Jeremy Goeringer (finance) were great to deal with.  My defenses were up when I first walked into their showroom but there was NO high pressure shenanaigans.
Bought a beautiful used Mercedes from them at a fair price.  I would not hesitate to refer any of my co-workers or clients (I am a Keller Williams real estate agent) to them. They carry only gently used "luxury" vehicles i.e. Mercedes, BMWs, Cadillacs, etc.
Their showroom # is: 864.631.1999
Email: [email protected]

I will surely be going back to them for my next vehicle as well.
Gary Bannon - Keller Williams Realty
700 Airport Road, Greenville, SC 29607 (864).323.8989
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    sal
  • August 15, 2013
Have to give a big thumbs up to Curtis Ryan Honda dealership in Shelton, CT. We had the pleasure of dealing with Scott as our sales person who made our leasing of a Honda CRV the most pleasurable experience we ever had. Yup you read that correctly. It does seem like an oxymoron but Scott was the most easy going person we have ever dealt with in a car showroom. No high pressure just an easy going exchange of information and arriving at a payment that benefited both of us. We also never had a salesperson who actually spent time with us going over all of the features and helping us to set up our blue tooth and radio stations. Come on who ever does this? Highly recommend Scott and this dealership to everyone. We will be back for a second car.
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    sal
  • August 15, 2013
Have to give a big thumbs up to Curtis Ryan Honda dealership in Shelton, CT. We had the pleasure of dealing with Scott as our sales person who made our leasing of a Honda CRV the most pleasurable experience we ever had. Yup you read that correctly. It does seem like an oxymoron but Scott was the most easy going person we have ever dealt with in a car showroom. No high pressure just an easy going exchange of information and arriving at a payment that benefited both of us. We also never had a salesperson who actually spent time with us going over all of the features and helping us to set up our blue tooth and radio stations. Come on who ever does this? Highly recommend Scott and this dealership to everyone. We will be back for a second car.
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    Bob Franklin
  • October 8, 2013
Great Job by Mike McKenzie at Jim Tidwell Ford Cobb County Ga. He worked a GREAT deal for me on a new 2013 F150 Platinum right off the bat without all the back and forth negotiations normally associated with buying a vehicle. Great Buying experience . I have already referred several friends . Great job Mike and to the whole Jim Tidwell TEAM !!!!! It's my 3rd vehicle I've purchased from them since 2002.
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