Autotrader Group in the News
THE joining together of CarsGuide and Autotrader with Gumtree in June last year will now see the businesses introduce a new joint proposition operating under a single Autotrader Group umbrella with a single touchpoint to the group by dealers. Since the purchase, Gumtree, CarsGuide and Autotrader have been canvassing dealers as they developed what they believe will be a strong new competitor within the online car classifieds market. The move is the most significant yet taken in the decades-long desire by the nation’s dealers to even up the competitive balance between classified websites. Under new plans revealed today, Gumtree Cars, Autotrader and CarsGuide will continue to operate as separate web entities from a public point of view. But they will now form a joint dealer proposition called Autotrader Group. At the same time, the various classified advertising offers formerly made to dealers across the three sites will now, for dealers using Autotrader Group, become a subscription-only advertising model. Alternative models such as pay-per-view were dropped because budgeting for that model by dealers was difficult to predict; potentially leading to bill shock. The changes will mean that rather than dealing with multiple advertising methods (pay-per-view and subscription), different billing systems and two field sales teams, dealers will have just one touchpoint and pay on just one invoice from the Group. The company says that it will continue to operate an ‘open platform’ where the dealers selling a car in an online listing are identified up front. This is a fundamental difference with Carsales which operates a ‘blind lead’ where the buyer does not know the identity of a dealer selling a car until the dealer makes contact. The new subscription model will have three packages called Economy, Essential and Elevated. Within each of these three levels are package tiers where a dealer can buy a number of car slots depending on how many cars the dealer wants to list in a month. A dealer with 100 used cars in stock would most likely choose a 100-car package.
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One feature of the package is that it can be topped up on the fly, within the same month. Each time a car is sold in a given month, the dealer can relist another replacement car at no additional cost (within the same month). A dealership theoretically selling all its used cars in a month could replenish all 100 listings all within the subscription price. The Economy package is a basic listings package of the dealer’s online listings displayed in the manner the dealership chooses. The medium Essential package brings in additional features and functions including videos, financing leads and the display of more information from the seller. The Elevated level offers such things as priority top ups and an in-depth integration to a dealer’s own advertising space linking back directly to their social media pages. Autotrader Group dealer sales director Richard Dicello told GoAutoNews Premium: “Autotrader Group now delivers a unique and powerful ecosystem that leverages CarsGuide’s editorial leadership, Gumtree Car’s large and vibrant shopping audience with Autotrader’s sophisticated automotive buying tools for a combined proposition that creates both efficiency for dealers and transparency for customers.” He said the Autotrader Group’s purpose is to “shake up the market and offer a genuine alternative for dealers to receive quality sales leads”. “Think of Autotrader Group as an ecosystem. Autotrader Group is the trade brand that we bring to market for our dealers. “The ecosystem will still consist of the three consumer offerings in the market; CarsGuide which is the leading editorial site in the country at the moment and we will obviously continue with Autotrader which brings the sophisticated automotive buying tools and the like. “Then obviously Gumtree as a whole will continue to do what they do, which is bringing seven million Aussies to the site every month. So Gumtree Cars represents a significant part of that ecosystem. “So we will still have those brands in the market, but the dealer will only see one source of connection with Autotrader Group and one source of lead from us as an organisation.”
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