Matt's Quick Guide to Selling You Car on the Internet
Sunday, March 28 2004: A gentlemam from Northville called me up on a Saturday afternoon after seeing my ad on cars.com for the Contour. He was at my house within a half hour and driving away in his new Contour within an hour. I would like to thank him and everyone that visited my site to check out my automobile.
This is the third car I have sold completely online, so I figured I would take a moment and drop a few hints if you happen upon my page and are looking to try to sell your automobile. Actually this is the first of the three cars I have sold that I asked a dealership to give me an estimate for a trade in. I wasn't expecting a lot, I thought my asking price of $6500 for the car was very fair in a private transaction (fairly new, very low miles and absolutely no problems with the car at all) but was given an offer in the order of one half of that. I was expecting low but not that low. I understand that used car dealers, especially Subaru dealers, probably won't have too much interest in a Ford and also have to make money off the car, but that was too low to accept. So I once again decided to go online with my sale.
The first car I sold online was a 1999 Mercury Sable. What I definetly did right, and did for each car I have sold since is to create a web site. Creating your own web site will allow you to share as much information as you want. Information and pictures are what is going to generate phone calls for your car and interest. Be as truthful as possible, put as much information as possible on your website. Take as many pictures as possible in as high of a resolution as possible. People will be interested and will view the all if they are truly interested in making a large money investment in you and your car. And when you're selling private party, your buyer really is making an investment in you as a person, keep this in mind.
For the Sable I was perticularly aggressive in wanting to sell it as I had already purchased a car to replace it, my college graduation gift to myself a 1993 Dodge Stealth Twin Turbo (very nice, very fast, very expensive). I purchased a domain name for my website titled buymysable.com and put my website on it. Along with the site I printed up a large banner to fill the entire length of my rear window with the domain name, along with a printout for each rear window. I wanted a multiple pronged marketing approach both Internet based and "land" based. If someone saw my car in person I figured they could pretty easily remember the weird guy that passed them with a "buymysable.com" banner in the rear window.
I wasn't perticularly excited about paying some service like AutoTrader.com, Cars.com or even my local paper for advertisement, so I decided to actively market the car myself. I visited ebaymotors.com, and as a registered user, I was able to e-mail bidders on auctions. I surfed through people bidding on used Tauruses and Sables I felt were comporable to mine giving them my website and contact information. This one tip worked out well since it was where I got my buyer. At that time I think eBay limited you to contacting 40 people a day, so I contacted a batch of 40 every day. I was in Texas doing work for my company when Tim called. Tim was in Georgia and was hot to fly into Michigan, give me my full asking price for the car, and drive it back to Georgia. Tim was buying the car for his daughter and said he would "fly to China for a good deal".
Tim was in Michigan within days of our call and drove his car back to Georgia. I spent probably 3 weeks trying to sell the car, it went without too much hassle.
From car selling experience #1:
Tip #1 If you know how, definetly make your own web site with as much information as you can, as many photos as you can, and even if you have a digital camcorder, make some movies (car starting up, tour of the car, etc...)
Tip #2 If you know how, buy a domain name for your car for sale. Something catchy and very short.
Tip #3 eBay still allows you to contact bidders for auctions. If your car is a good value, these buyers will be interested.
Fast forward two years, I am enjoying my Stealth, but not really enjoying the expense of owning it. Between premium gas, very premium no-fault insurance payments (stupid weiner Michigan) and inevitable expensive repairs (first gear synchros were a bit of a mess) I decided to get out of the Stealth. I immediately did the standard, got the car washed thuroughly, cleaned inside and out spotless. Took it to a nice park on a sunny day and took a large number of pictures. I didn't have too much excess money at the time, so I posted the car on my existing website, nerdstuff.net instead of purchasing a domain name.
The market for this type of car is much smaller, and more concentrated, but I once again hit eBay regularly and e-mailed bidders. The main thing I did differently this time around was to post the car for sale on specific web sites that cater to the automobile. For example, the Dodge Stealth has a very active enthusiasts group called 3si.org. 3si.org has an awesome forum where people post questions, have conversations, etc... I posted my car in the Classifieds section (good thing, since the buyer Emily found the ad in the classifieds there.)
In addition to 3si.org, I searched out various classifieds web sites available on the Internet. If you're a buyer or seller of used cars you probably know a lot about autotrader.com or cars.com (at this time stoneage.com was a big one which doesn't seem to exist anymore). The problem with these sites is that they charge you a ridiculous fee (IMHO), limit the amount of information and pictures you can post and in the case of autotrader won't even allow you to post a link to your personal site for the car. Silly. The good news is that there are lots of other automobile classifieds out there, many free. The bad news is that next to no one visits them. I know when I was looking for my current car, a Subaru, I didn't go anywhere but autotrader and cars.com. But still, search these out and post your car information and your website, since they are free and can only drive the hits to your website. I would recommend doing a google search to find appropriate classifieds for you. Approach the search as though you are a buyer and not a seller. There will be tons of websites out there trying to rip you off or make money for what you can do for yourself if you google for "sell my car". Instead, do a search similar to what you would expect someone interested in your car would search for. Start simple with "used car classifieds" but then get more specific like "michigan free classifieds" or "michigan automobiles sales". I posted the Stealth probably on 10 - 12 free classified sites. Since they are lower traffic they brought a lower amount of interest into the site but interestinglyenough I still get an email or two a month for the Stealth from these free ads that I posted over 2 years ago.
As I mentioned previously I snagged my seller from the 3si.org message board. Emily drove in with her sister from Pennsylvania. We met at my bank, completed the transaction (I sold the car for the same amount I purchased it for due to my marketing efforst by the way) and she drove away in her new car. My wife and I left the transaction and drove to a Ford dealer to test drive a Ford Focus wagon. Call me a puss puss, but I've always wanted a station wagon. The wagon was utter crap, but they had a 2000 Contour with very low miles for a very low price. I wasn't excited or very interested in the car, but it was a decent enough deal so we bought it on the spot.
Tip #4 Proactively search out people interested in your car. There will be websites and mailing lists for your car. Join them, and if appropriate, post a quick note with your cars info and a link to your website. I realize you are probably saying, "Matt, I am selling a minivan" or something, thinking there will be no such website, but I know for a fact there is a very active Ford Contour owners website (which is one of the more unexciting cars ever produced), so I have to believe there is something for every car, ever.
Tip #5 Expand beyond the pay listing sites, and hit some of the freebies. Don't expect these to set the world on fire, but those few hits a day may well be enough.
So that brings us up to my final foray into online car sales, my 2000 Contour Sport. The car was truly great and I get the vibe it was going to live forever as it never so much squeaked wrong. The front tires were in piss poor shape so I sat down with my wife to have a "state of the state" talk about our finances to see when we wanted to get some tires. Through that talk we decided maybe we wanted something a little bigger, little nicer, etc.. so by the end we decided to look for another car. A week later I had purchased a 2000 Subaru Outback Limited. In that process, for the first time, I approached the dealer about a trade in. I knew they were going to offer less that I would be able to get personally (and from the previous two experiences I had selling online I was fairly confident in my ability to sell) but was interested in the ease of the transaction in just handing it over to them. The Subaru had a sticker price and I had the magical number of $4500 in my head for the Contour for what I was expecting from the dealer. I was going to need a $2000 swing in either the Subaru's asking price or the Contour to satisfy me (so either $6500 for the Contour or $2000 off the Subaru). The dealer came back with an offer of $3500 for the Contour, which blew my socks off, but was willing to take $1250 off the Subaru. The Subaru was already several thousand less than the same model with the same features at another Subaru dealer a few miles away, and with a warranty and the complete service and sales records for the car (originally bought at the dealership) I couldn't pass it up. I drove home in my new Subaru and had two cars, the mighty Soob and my Contour.
I set about doing my same routine. Cleaned car. Lots of pictures. Website. Lots and lots of information. Visited the Contour owners website and posted a message (generating 5 - 10 hits a day still). Sent a message to the Michigan Contour Owners mailing list I was already a member of. A week went by with little action.
I imagine if you've read this far you would expect that I would follow my routine and say here that I e-mailed bidders on eBay, but I didn't (ok, that's a lie, I contacted maybe 10 people via eBay). You see the valuation on the Contour is surprisingly low, especially in the auction market. The car is a lame duck of sorts since 2000 was the last model year. I believe a lot were rentals in the fleet market, which are dumped after 2 or 3 years and sink the values as well. Many Contours were going for $2000 or $3000 on eBay. Mine was newer, had much lower miles and I firmly believe was much cleaner and nicer, but it's hard to pitch your $6500 car to someone expecting to pay $2000 for a Contour on eBay. (Less than half, for the Sable I would e-mail people who were bidding 50 - 70% of what I was asking for the Sable, I felt we were in the same ballpark)
The Contour wasn't paid off, so I wasn't excited at the prospect of making another payment on it (but not paniced either since it was sitting in my garage not really depreciating, and I knew it was a good deal at the $6500 mark). So I decided to cheat a little and break my own rules. The biggest paper in my area is the Detroit Free Press, so I took out a 4 day weekend ad in the Free Press. In spite of a little disagreement with the paper, when my ad was mistakingly run in the Lincoln section as opposed to the Ford section, I got probably 5 calls over the weekend. Lots of interest, but no one even showed up or called back for a test drive. The next weekend I placed an ad in the smaller, but much more targetted local newspaper, the Oakland Press (still going to probably a million people, so not a small paper by any means). The 4 day weekend ad generated 0 calls.
I was about two weeks in and decided to break down and place an ad on cars.com. Cars.com is far less evil to me than autotrader, since they allow you place a lot of pictures online, and apparently didn't object to my placing the link to my website in the ad. This ad generated a good number of hits, and I had e-mails from three sepearte people within 24 hours of placing the ad online. 3 days after placing the ad, I got a call from Frank who purchased the car within an hour of our phone conversation (I told you it was a nice car.).
Around the same time as the cars.com ad, I had another brainstorm. If you've open a web browser recently (and you're here, so I assume you have) then you've used google (and you most likely used google to arrive here). Well you know those ads that pop up on the right hand side of the results that you receive? Google calls those AdWords, and you too can place ads in there! I had had great success placing ads for my movie review website, JackassCritics.com. The trick I learned spreading the JackassCritics.com word was to catch on the hot internet buzz of the week, and take out an ad. The Dixie Chicks say they hate GW Bush, take a Google Ad out saying JackassCritics.com hates the Dixie Chicks. Bam, 3000 people seeing JackassCritics ad within an hour. We want to be a little more focused with our car ad though.
AdWords work like this. You sign up for an account. I believe to cut down on the riff raff, Google charges a $5 fee to open an AdWord account. I know this sounds a bit scammy, but c'mon, it's Google, not Amway. You are then free to start your ad campaign. I created a campaign for my Contour. I was able to choose which "keywords" I would like my Ad to appear on. For my car, I chose a couple: "ford contour", "michigan used cars", "mercury mystique" (the Contour's alter ego) and a few other less popular ones. Once again, here it's more important to think like someone that might be interested in buying your car than someone trying to sell a car. If you were in the market for your car, what terms would you put in Google to research or buy one? Buy those keywords for the most success. You tell Google the maximum amount you are willing to pay if someone clicks on your ad. This means you are only charged when someone is enticed enough to click on your ad, not for showing them the ad. I capped my ad at $.10 per click (for JackassCritics I would do something like $0.04, but I'm not generating revenue from JAC, whereas to land a $6500 sale I figured I'd splurge). Google then reported back for each of my keywords, their potential placement (for example, "ford contour" was pretty popular, so at best my ad was going to be #4 or #5 in the list. If I paid more, my ad would be placed higher) and the number of impressions (showings) that google predicts I would get in a day based on traffic for those keywords. I tell Google to cap my spending at $4.00 a day (I wouldn't expect, but wouldn't want to spend $100 a day).
I checked back two days later. The "ford contour" keyword was the most popular, giving over 500 impressions. I was getting a little over 1% of a click rate, and owed google under a dollar. It's important to craft your ad decently, as if you drift too far below, Google will yank your ad (after all they are advertising your material for free, and only get paid when someone clicks on your ad.) These didn't lead to any direct contact with me, and the time period was so short I'd say the jury is out on this one. Still I can see this idea becoming more popular in time...
Tip #6 Well eventually you may have to break down and cheat. If you are going to spend money, in my case the best spent money was an ad on cars.com. It generated a lot of hits, allowed me to place a lot of information (do you get the hint that I feel information is key, yet) and eventually lead to my buyer.
Tip #7 Your local newspaper is worthless. Not only are they extremely expensive (I paid over $60 a piece for the ads for a long weekend) but they will generate you no interest. I know I would never look in a paper for a car. Why would I when I can intelligently visit a web site with unlimimted information and comporable listings all freely available to me. I know you are going to miss the segment of people (namely, old people) who don't have computers or would never use their computer to do something like a car purchase, but with all the time you spent reading this article and maybe building your car for sale website, that isn't exactly who we are marketing to anyways, is it?
Tip #8 Google AdWords. If you've already got an account (a $5 setup fee) then you have next to nothing to lose. At only $.10 a click at the most, thats crazy cheap advertising compared to the $80 or so of blood money that a newspaper would pimp you for for an ad with less impact, less coverage, etc... If you don't have an account, I'd still encourage you to sign up, the $5 could be money well spent, especially if you nab a buyer from it.
Well that's the limit of what I've learned. I would say all these tips apply to you, and can make you a lot of money in comparison to a dealer trade in, but they only really apply if you have a quality product to sell. I can't help you turn water into wine people. It all goes back to the car. In all three cases, my car was exceptionally cleaned and taken care of. I was surprised when I was looking for my latest car (buying the Subaru) I went to used car dealers who were showing cars that were dirty. Disgusting, unprofessional. If I am making my car look better with a half hour of vacuuming and Febreezing and a trip through the $2 auto wash, you've got a real quality problem on your hands. Best of luck to you!
If you have any questions, please feel free to shoot me an e-mail... matt@nerdstuff.net
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