SmartAuction has created electronic tools to help dealers who use the remarketing site more easily identify used vehicles to buy and better price the vehicles they sell.
The site's new Dealer eVantage sends morning e-mails to dealership used-vehicle buyers alerting them to specific vehicles added to the site overnight that match their buyer profile, says Mark Newman, SmartAuction's managing director.
For dealers looking to sell used cars and trucks on the auction site, eVantage sends alerts advising them of the likelihood that their vehicles will sell at their asking prices or at prices suggested by SmartAuction.
The free alerts hit dealers' e-mail boxes by 10 a.m. Eastern time Monday through Friday. Dealers can continue to log onto the site and do their own searches, says Newman.
"We're trying to take the work out of using the platform by providing tools through dealer eVantage that will help dealers leverage their SmartAuction experience," he says.
SmartAuction's data show what vehicles a given dealership buys and bids on. It also uses vehicle registration data to track retail sales. Tapping that data, SmartAuction can alert a dealership buyer to vehicles added to the site that match the buyer's needs. Each buyer alert contains five to 30 vehicles.
Any dealership that has vehicles for sale on the site will get an alert at the end of the first day the vehicle is listed, summarizing the probability of the vehicle selling at the price for which it is listed.
Bob Bakshi, dealer principal of Parkway Motorcars in Valencia, Calif., says he sells about a dozen vehicles a month on SmartAuction and recently used the tool to adjust the price of a 2007 Chevrolet TrailBlazer initially priced at $12,000.
"My used-car manager came to me and said 'Bob, this is too high. I just got an alert that it should be priced in the $10,000 to $11,000 range'," says Bakshi, whose company sells Buick, GMC, Cadillac, Hyundai, Infiniti and Volkswagen vehicles. "The minute we did that, we sold it."
Newman says dealers can choose not to receive the service. But he notes that SmartAuction has a wealth of information as a result of remarketing hundreds of thousands of vehicles. Says Newman: "We're making that same information available to our dealer base."
