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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IDMS by DealerSocket
Score 4.1 out of 10
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DealerSocket’s IDMS combines its web-based design and custom reporting for a DMS solution designed to help independent and BHPH dealers be successful. IDMS gives web-based access with mobile capabilities, configurable workflows, and more than 50 third-party integrations.
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.
The sales system (Black Bird) is amazing, but if you're looking for a service scheduling solution, keep moving, this is not helpful. Their support doesn't even know what their program can do, online scheduling for guests is AWFUL, and the list goes on and on. Our business didn't even keep it a year because it was that frustrating for our scheduling team, for guests booking online, and ESPECIALLY for our service advisers and service managers.
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 service scheduler is mediocre at best. It offers very little control over what's coming in and is extremely clunky.
Adding a new user is a terrible experience for service. They need to be added to the BlackBird side, then to the scheduler as an adviser, then given permissions as a user, then given override permissions. It's way too complicated.
Their support team knew less about their scheduler than I did. I was almost training them within a week.
We were using CDK CRM for the sales side of things, which was greatly outdated and DealerSocket absolutely blew it out of the water. However, we were using Xtime for service prior to the switch and after just 10 months, we are back to our original system. We wanted to integrate both sales and service within the same system, which is why we went with DealerSocket, but it's not worth all the trouble it brings.
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.
