Automotive Marketing

The most popular scam on craigslist is what I call the Too Much Money Scam. A too much money scammer will email you ready to buy whatever you have listed. He will explain how sure he is that he wants to buy your item, and frequently he will ask you to take down your advertisement and consider the item sold.

The price will never be a problem for a scammer, and he will offer too much or explain that he will send more than enough money to cover the cost of shipping or even ask for a refund on his payment. I published an example email of this scam last year, but the nature and details of the situation the buyer presents are always changing.

The trick to the scam is once money is accepted from this stranger, any transaction made after is the account holder’s choice and your responsibility. The scammer delivers money that does not exist in an attempt to get some of it re-routed or cashed and handed to him or a low life associate.

This week a coworker is selling a dirt bike and the first email he got was a too much money scammer wanting him to take down the craigslist ad because he was going to UPS a check right away.

Another coworker was skeptical when a buyer wanted to send him too much money to cover the cost of a “friend coming to pick up the item.” This specific case was not an automotive sale but a pet prop.

The one signal that remains constant in this scam is too much money.

I was searching this morning to find some information I needed for a conference call about Craigslist today. I will discuss some of the things I learned later. While searching, I happened upon a neat group of sites that I would like to share. It seems that when Craig wrote the Craigslist terms of use, he nailed it.

The terms are so good, in fact, that when some other businesses read his terms, they immediately copy and paste them to their own website without replacing every instance of “craigslist” with their own name.

Websites that stole Craig’s terms of use

• http://www.indiaclassy.com/terms.html
• http://www.curdy.com/terms-of-use.html
• http://www.juliesbarn.com/home/?view=terms&cityid=-55
• http://www.dateilicious.com/Terms.php
• http://www.rockstarrecruiting.com/corp/terms
• http://www.worldpropertyservices.com/terms.cfm
• http://www.aiscolorado.org/termsofuse.htm
• http://www.campusmonster.org/terms/
• http://classifiedtree.com/rptcontentmgmt.aspx?inid=7
• http://www.yokepal.com/terms_of_services.php
• http://www.internationalgcl.com/terms.php
• http://iannouncethis.com/terms-of-use.html
• http://yodoleslist.com/terms.htm

The list goes on and on and on. I am stunned by the amount of half-assed companies that are too lazy to do a simple find and replace after taking someone else’s work.

Friend or Foe?

Craigslist is a game changer. Dealers that have never heard of CL are stunned to hear that it is a free service that can get 1,000 people to view a car classified ad in a single day. However, in its present form, craigslist will not change the automotive industry. Imagine a day where as many dealers that refresh their listings on Autotrader can do the same thing on craigslist. Mayhem. The (lack of) search features on CL prevent thousands of new items in a single day to be properly sorted and consumed by shoppers.

The wall that holds back this onslaught of ads is the terms of service. Dealers rely on third parties to distribute their ads, and craigslist does not permit third parties to create ads. This makes the craigslist terms of service a huge road block for a lot of companies like mine.

I see it differently. The TOU is what enables me to succeed on the site. It protects the listings I create from the onslaught of violators and spammers. If you take the time to read the terms and become a regular user of the site it is not long before you can make the posting process more efficient without violating the mighty posting agent section of the terms.

Take aways

I learned a few things today. First, there is always someone out there with a sloppy written program that gives me clues on how to automate tasks. For example, one of the people in the conference call today mentioned he can combat competitors that relentlessly flag your legit ads to hurt your business. I had not considered a flagging bot until this was said, but a simple search turns up Craig’s Flagger, a program that automates the process of terminating any ad posted by a spammer. It does not work. No surprise. Put a tool like this out in the open that can easily be identified after it starts flagging at the click of a button.

I also learned that keyword stuffing still works to this day. I see ads that have random chunks of other web pages at the bottom. Thomas Jefferson quotes, UNIX user manual sections, you name it and someone has surely used it to trip up the CL filters.

The most exciting thing about today’s conference was I found out that my tactics are still a cut above the rest. I was fairly convinced when I noticed a couple competitors redesigning their ad designs to be 90% copies of mine, but today I was stunned to see one of the most sophisticated craigslist programs I have demoed to date–one capable of completely automatic daily posting without the risk of detection as a single source–struggling with the filters (see previous paragraph).

Is the craigslist terms of use friend or foe? What does that tell you about your commitment to craigslist success?

I am continually amazed at the brand position that CARFAX maintains. Consumers are seemingly unaware of any alternative to their vehicle history report service.

AutoCheck exists

AutoCheck LLC was born in 1998. By 2002, when almost a million AutoCheck reports were being served each month, the company entered an agreement with Experian and became an Experian Automotive product. This partnership would transform the AutoCheck reports from being primarily an auction product to a mainstream consumer product in direct competition with CARFAX.

Too little too late

The game was already over, and CARFAX won. By December of 1996, consumers could access reports through CARFAX’s website that contained title information for all fifty states. AutoCheck’s delivery of this feature was 5 years late, enough time for CARFAX to brand the product as their own. Today, AutoCheck is still reinventing their product and acquiring partnerships with sites like eBay Motors to boost their brand.

Experian doubles the amount of time that $25 can access unlimited reports; CARFAX gives 30 days and AutoCheck gives 60. I feel this is a small edge that has a small effect on consumers. When 11 out of 12 people can name CARFAX and no alternative, price points mean very little.

Update: I wrote this today when the Yahoo! Answers question had 12 responses. There’s a few more now, numbers 13 and 14 that are pro AutoCheck and surprisingly emotional. You goons. You fool no one.

In a recent post, I discussed a vehicle lead that I thought was interesting. The question was raised that the lead might have been a scammer (it was not). I thought it would be interesting to discuss how I identify garbage leads that enter my system.

Here’s a list of red flags or warning signals that may indicate that the sales lead is a scam or automated bot garbage. No signal by itself indicates that a lead is definitely garbage, but a combination of a few might.  

1. The same message is sent from different names or email addresses. Scammers rarely submit a single lead on a single vehicle. Most crap arrives in chunks of 5 or 10 leads. While a real person might copy and paste the same message to multiple dealers, they will always use the same name and email address. It is extremely unlikely that two legit shoppers will compose the same email on the same day.

   
   Figure 1

2. Requests originating in multiple cities by a single individual may indicate auto submission. See Figure 2.
3. If a shopper’s name does not match their email address, the lead might have been automatically generated.

   
   Figure 2

4. Mention of a shipping company or agent is likely a scam. Car classified sites get hit with a scam that is popular on craigslist, the shipping agent scam. The alleged buyer is convinced he would like to purchase, and will send a check for an amount greater than the listed price to cover the shipping. This scam is designed to rope the seller into committing check fraud from their own account via the payment to the “shipping company.” Here’s an actual scam message that was submitted to one of my sites:
   

   Hello
   Thanks for the response
   I want you to know that the USA Cashier check you would be receiving shortly is meant for both the buying and shipping.
   Though you are not required to handle the shipping but what is required of you just simple and straight forward and I need to let you know now.
   Immediately you receive the cashiers check……Take it to the bank and deposit it when the funds clear in your account……..Deduct your amount for sale of this item…..Secondly, Transfer the remaining money to the shipping company that would be coming for the pick-up after you might have deducted all the necessary charges…..Finally, fix a convenient date with the freight company that you would be around so that they can come and pick the item up for shipping.
   But I have some questions to ask you please………………………………..
   1) Would you be able to transfer the shippers funds to them same day you receive the funds?
   2) Can I trust you with my money?
   3} confirm your name and address that you want the money send to to avoid sending money to wrong address
   Please email back with your reply to this and let me have your word as I need to conclude this transaction within the shortest period.

More information about this particular scam is all over the web, but my favorite page is provided by the community of craigslist.

The “red flag” criteria listed above can be easily translated into logic to flag leads for an editorial review. Here’s a list of words that I also use to scan messages for dead beats:

• transaction
• freight company
• shipping company
• shipping agent
• cashiers check
• cashier’s check
• your account
• account number
• account #
• account no
• deduct
• the funds
• trust you
• my client
• my customer
• my buyer
• USA
• personal assistant
• shippment
• shipment
• shipper
• westernunion
• western union
• money gram
• money gramm

A list like this is a great tool to flag leads for further review. I will update this post with additional phrases that I add to my filter.

Sounds too good to be true, I agree. Today, I misspelled the domain name of a website I wanted to visit, and I found OnlineDealer.net. The website is short on details, but it appears to be based in Ohio.

I love question and answer sites. Yahoo! Answers is my favorite, but all of them fill the search-by-question void that the old Ask.com left behind. It feels natural to type some search queries like questions, and if your question hasn’t been answered yet you can get some responses within seconds. Even if your question is asking someone to give you a CARFAX report for free.

Free CARFAX Reports via Yahoo! Answers

The vehicle history report scene just got a little more cheesey. When I see the words “vehicle history report”, I think of CARFAX. The Virginia based company has successfully created and branded this concept, and I doubt that it was hard to market a such a useful product.

Experian’s AutoCheck was a carbon copy, right down to the buy back guarantee, until today.

AutoCheck is launching an innovative new feature for the AutoCheck® service that all of our existing dealers begin to use on July 16th. This new feature is called the AutoCheck ScoreSM. The AutoCheck Score is a number between 1 and 100, and we also include the AutoCheck Score RangeSM that provides a benchmark of how similar age and class vehicles perform. This new feature helps dealers and their customers better interpret the data in AutoCheck report.

For those dealer customers that currently have AutoCheck report link for their on-line inventories, we are offering a new implementation mechanism to display AutoCheck Score on the vehicle detail page.

Attached are the instructions for the implementation of AutoCheck Score tile on vehicle detail page. See also a sample “vehicle detail page” that shows how the AutoCheck Score can look on your dealer’s Web sites, as well as all of the creative you need to get it implemented properly.

AkA AutoCheck’s latest effort to outbrand CARFAX. Create a free widget and expand your real estate on websites all over the web.

Click anywhere on AutoCheck’s section of your page and go to the AutoCheck report. AutoCheck ‘owns’ the AutoCheck Score tile, so who knows what else might start showing up as a feature. Widgets are a great marketing tool, and it is no secret. AutoCheck’s new car widget provides a snapshot of the history report that can be seen before the actual report, which draws more interest to their primary product. I like the simplified rating idea, but let us visit the contrast.

CARFAX is not interested in the idea of modifying their product. They disallow custom wording on dealer websites to the effect of “the full report is not available” and deliver only the report or their record check summary page.

Both ideas are interesting. I think CARFAX benefits from not changing.

My copy of the NIADA Used Car Industry Report arrived this week. My only remaining memory of last year’s edition was how a lot of the pie graphs did not add up to 100%. I wish I still had the 2006 report, because I found problems with this year’s graphs, too.

I’m hoping sure that this (and last year’s) errors are just graphical errors with the print and not the data in any way, but I could not resist. Fifteen is the new seventeen.

Non-subscribers can download a free copy of the 2007 Used Car Industry Report via the publications link in my last update.

NIADA is really stepping up their web presence. Although I could do without the sounds and commercials on their home page, the organization has a lot of great resources available for free online. Here is a list of my favorites NIADA web pages.

1. The Ultimate Vendor Guide : Directory of software and technology service providers
2. Publications : Including the monthly UCDM, PDF documents, IRS help
3. State Association contact list : With website URLs where applicable

Out of these resources, the State Association list is the one that I refer dealers to most often.

Exploring the gray matter of auto marketing

Wrap your brain around this term: neurological marketing.

Auto marketers study consumers’ brain waves so as to make TV commercials more effective. It’s not science fiction. It’s here.

Read the full story at AutoWeek.com. More and more marketing studies involve brain scanning to determine effectiveness.

The key to engaging a customer with an advertisement is to play on their emotions. The article mentions the VW commercials that start with a casual conversation in the car and usually end with a nice T-bone crash. Volkswagen wants you to put yourself in that car so you too can fear for your life.

Buy a Jetta! You won’t die!