ROBERT MORFFI JOHN LYNCH
JAMES LONZORA and BRIAN BAINUM
All rated EXCELLENT.

Almost 40% of AIU’s are researching the “Dealers Reputation” prior to making a decision on where to shop. This is the future!!!! And It’s here…

Does anyone out there buy anything on-line that has a Poor rating or Zero Feedback?

Put yourselves in a consumers shoes…. Who would you do business with?

I am a big fan of Dealer Rater and have encouraged many of my clients to sign up and leverage what it has to offer. It is my belief that online rating sites such at Dealer Rater are going to make a huge impact on the purchasing decisions of our consumers. Ask yourself what the best form of marketing is. It’s word of mouth. Dealer Rater does just that. I recently purchased a TV. I was doing all sorts of research online. What swayed my decision were the blogs I read by other consumers. Not write ups by the manufacturers or one 3rd party that rates products, but those write ups by my peers who have experienced the product first hand. Next, I had to decide where to purchase it. I scanned the blogs and decided, after reading the reviews, where to go. And WOW! They were right! I had a great experience over all.

I think it’s time. Dealer Rater is positioned well and is ready to make a huge impact.

For the most part, we use ebay to sell parts as our website doesn’t get much search engine traffic, and adwords was getting to be a little too much money for our margins. It seems more of a culture thing at ebay for customers to leave feedback, however, when we ask our customers to rate us online, they are happy to. We have a testimonial section on our website, but it is just snippets of reviews customers left on dealerrater. If our website supported it, we would just frame it in!

As it is, customers can learn a lot about dealers online, but that also means dealers who know how to use it to their benefit will also see success in it. I suspect with the way it’s growing, Amit, you’ll see the number of reviews grow to what you might consider valuable enough, quickly. I just hope we have given ourselves enough of a lead. A bit of a chicken and the egg thing. We have 80 or so reviews on dealerrater and our competition is still in the 20s and 30s. I think that’s enough to make an opinion on, but not near our 300+ ratings we have on ebay. A lot of our ebay reviews look like school grades (A+++, well ok, not MY school grades…) and don’t provide much substance, but then again, we’re selling parts on it, not cars so there’s less to talk about process wise I guess. When it comes right down to it though, it’s fairly easy to get customers to write a review if you just remind them to.

For bad reviews, when they come in and they will as no one’s perfect, being able to answer to it quickly is the answer, especially if you can fix the problem before CSI, make right with the customer, and have them update their review. That might not always work, but you have to try.

Sorry, just saw the customer-rater.com idea, haha that would be a great parody site – or even a good learning tool for new sales people…if blocked to the general public of course!

OK, enough procrastinating Generation Kill is almost on,

Jamie

You can argue that it might bring in to question the validity of a customer rating/review but if third-party sites aren’t cutting it then there must be a reason why customers are not compelled to utilize this.

Could also just be a socio-cultural thing too that requires more time.

But it does not change my opinion that the average shopper going to DealerRater.com is unlikely to get enough information, because there just aren’t enough ratings overall. For whatever reason, consumers will spend huge amounts of time on the vehicle research process and then move directly to buying without considering dealership ratings/reviews. Maybe we’ll get there someday.

btw, Mitch’s observations on his review limbo blog (mentioned earlier) are damning if true.