Cox company Dealer.com offers a suite of marketing applications and support for online and digital marketing, product presentation and dealer websites, digital advertising and retargeting, and managed services if desired.
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ERA-IGNITE
Score 7.0 out of 10
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Reynolds and Reynolds, headquartered in Dayton, offers the Windows-based ERA-IGNITE dealer management system (DMS). ERA-IGNITE offers a single system with a single unique identifier for every customer, every vehicle, and every transaction.
Dealer.com is good at figuring out unique filters for how inventory will show up on the website. When vehicles should/should not show up, badges on particular vehicles, etc. Easy to change website templates. The issue is that templates are all starting to look alike. Also, they do try to make things look nice but are falling behind in functionality. For example, specials pages. I know people don't think much of blogs, but that is where we can post local content and Google crawl and use that for search engines. Dealer.com is probably one of the worst with blogs. Either you have to pay for it separately just to have it (not included in the website), or you have to have Premium SEO Package.
ERA-IGNITE works well for day to day operations at Car Dealerships. It will maintain your customer records. It is lacking a little in mainlining employee records, as you have to switch back and forth between ERA "blue screen" (older version) and IGNITE "point and click" (newer version). Overall, though it will get the job done.
Advertising (adwords/FB). Our rep used to lead that and we would discuss results and game plans on each monthly call. Apparently, now, they moved all advertising to a group and some random person handles it and I never get told anything anymore. No monthly calls, no strategies. If I even want to know the results, I have to force communications instead of them sending me results/reports themselves.
Cookie-cutter approach to all content creation, SEO work, advertising, etc. No local touch or unique detail is given.
Falling behind the competition. The details they are improving are not the things that are important to my managers/our team. Managers now bring up how other sites are better than ours a lot more than they used to.
The Financial Statements can only be printed on legal and instead of scrolling through it to look at it you have to navigate it at the top with the arrows.
Their time clock is not user-friendly. You cannot just pull up one person and look at their time and make changes. You have to go through like you want to print, look at the time for the employee to find errors, then back out and go into a different screen to correct.
Giving employees access to different functions is a nightmare. It is not at all laid out the way Ignite is used, and there are numerous hidden check boxes.
How can you give concrete info on ROI? A website is a requirement, so obviously it has had a positive impact since that is the #1 place customers will shop our inventory.
Traffic to our website has steadily increased over the years, so we know that Google is still finding it, and it's doing its job for searches.
