Reynolds has long offered dealers a “Dealer Management System” to manage business. Now, Reynolds’ DMS customers can have their vehicles listed on CarLocate.com. Only vehicles sold by Reynolds customers appear.
Reynolds started the site in summer 2009. Serious marketing began six months ago.
Confined to Reynolds DMS customers, the site offers 750,000 listings. A Reynolds spokesman declined to say how many unique visitors the site attracts.
“It’s hard to give an apple-to-apples comparison when you have some mega-sites out there,” said Thomas Schwartz, a Reynolds and Reynolds spokesman.
By comparison, AutoTrader.com lists more than 3 million vehicles and draws 14.8 million unique visitors monthly. Cars.com says it has nearly 11 million visitors a month, with 2.6 million vehicles in its inventory. (AutoTrader.com is owned by Cox Enterprises, which also owns the Dayton Daily News.)
Mark Scott, spokesman for AutoTrader, said his company has monitored CarLocate.com
“AutoTrader is the leading company in our space, and we’d like to stay that way,” Scott said.
Mitch Golub, president of Cars.com, doesn’t see CarLocate.com as a primary competitor. He contends that the online auto shopping arena isn’t about dealers — it’s about consumers.
Scott, however, said the focus needs to be on both dealer and consumer.
“We were founded in the early days of the Internet and grew both our inventory and our base of eyeballs at the same time,” Scott said.
Golub said the question for Reynolds is: “Are you willing to invest the hundreds of millions of dollars it takes to be a competitor in this space?”
Succeeding will take millions in search marketing and television advertising, Golub said. “So far, they (CarLocate.com) haven’t showed up much on our radar.”
For Reynolds, focusing on consumers is new.
“It’s not really shifting our focus away from dealers to customers,” Schwartz said. “It’s complementary.”
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2390 or tgnau@DaytonDailyNews.com.
About the Author
