In February, when Cox Automotive Canada and Trader officially ended their partnership providing websites and related services to Canadian dealerships, the competitive landscape changed overnight.
Canadian dealerships who were previously using a Dealer.com website platform sold by Trader now have to make a choice. Do they rebuild their websites from scratch with Trader, who have formed a new partnership with Vancouver-based website provider Convertus, or rebuild their sites on an improved Dealer.com platform from Cox Automotive?
Many dealers have known the change was coming for months, but the partnership between the companies officially ended in February, and now it’s very much on the minds of dealers. Dealers at the CADA Summit in February were chatting about it, and pitches are being delivered to dealers across the country.
We caught up with Maria Soklis, President of Cox Automotive Canada to learn more about Dealer.com’s plans for Canada.
“Our mission for Dealer.com is to be the premier digital platform and partner in Canada, similar to how we are the premier digital platform and partner in the U.S. It is not going to be something new for us,” said Soklis.
For her part, Soklis said that she welcomes the competition, and has advised her team to be transparent with dealers and respectful of the competition. “It has been a dog fight, it’s going to be competitive. But there’s no benefit to getting cut-throat with each other. I just think it defeats the purpose of trying to shape the future of the industry, and of trying to help our customers be more successful in their business,” said Soklis.
Soklis said while she appreciated the partnership with Trader, both companies agreed that they could each serve the needs of Canadian dealerships better by going their separate ways. For Dealer.com, that meant coming directly into Canada through Cox Automotive Canada and not through a reseller agreement with Trader.
“There were needs that we felt that we could better reach the market with if we had more control over some of the decisions, as opposed to a partner making decisions for us,” she said. “Cox Automotive is a large company with a variety of products and services. We felt there was a competitive advantage that we could offer our customers from a service and a connectivity standpoint, since a lot of our products integrate.”
The company has now built up a sizable Dealer.com Canadian team from coast to coast offering sales, development and bilingual support — and they are still adding to it. “We wanted to build the team here in Canada since Cox Automotive Canada is managing the product.”
She added that Dealer.com is also now able to offer new capabilities that were previously not available in the Canadian marketplace. “For various different reasons, we couldn’t offer some of the same functionality that we offered our customers in the U.S. We’ve now corrected that in Canada, and have made sure that the product is on par with the U.S. product. We’re starting to build our capabilities and roadmap out based on what we see, and hear, from our customers,” said Soklis.
Soklis said, for example, that Canadian dealers will benefit from the platform’s mobile-first design and new Vehicle Deal Pages (VDP) that make the vehicle the hero and integrate it with Dealertrack Canada’s Digital Retailing product suite. “Then, we have a Special Campaigns Manager tool, which helps our customers to easily create and distribute specials across their sites for vehicles, models, service parts or events. Dealers can actually have their specials automatically created and distributed,” she explained.
Another new feature for Canadian dealers is Stackable Incentives that provides clear and transparent pricing and incentives associated with any given vehicle. “Dealer.com has, arguably, the most advanced group functionality tools in the industry,” she said.
Beyond the website platform, Dealer.com offers Advertising services to help dealerships better manage and execute their digital advertising strategies and managed services resources to help create and manage custom content. “We have experts who will be not only working with our customers to build personalized and integrated websites, but they will also be able to use the vast amount of data we have available to help make good decisions for the customers on what they should be doing and validating that,” she said.
So what advice would Soklis have for dealerships trying to decide on what to do?
“Dealers are always going to be faced with the challenge of making decisions. I think the best advice I can give is this: when they partner, they need to make sure that whoever the company they’re partnering with is vested in their interests and in this industry here in Canada long term,” she said. “The products and services that we offer will continue to evolve at an unprecedented speed. We will have industry leading innovations. We’ll be able to leverage cutting edge data, cutting edge technology, and create something that is more personalized for them as a unique Canadian dealer. And it will be coming from us, here in Canada.”
