• Free sites? Need dealer’s approval
• Poll: Need your feedback
• Craigs List accounts getting stolen
• New FREE site: Please approve
• TEXT Message technology implemented on PGILIST
• New distribution for PGILIST
• Internet Flag system incorporated in both magazines
• System fixes & updates
• Craig’s List Top 20 cars
• Stephanie Armstrong moving to California
• Car of the month

Traditionaly we will always set up any free feeds requested by a website as we have belived these to be positive advertising and exposure for the dealers.

We have recently encountered 2 issues that require a change of policy:

• Some dealers didn’t feel confortable with some of the free sites.
• Some sites marketted cars on Craigs List for a sales person without the dealer knowing.

The first issue is hard to spot since it depends on each particualr dealer point of view. The second issue is easier to spot (usually requested on a by dealer basis) and it brought other problems such as flagging for duplication, different prices on Craigs List, etc.

An easy fix is to require dealer authorization for any feeds, nothing fancy; just send me an email, click on the links we provide (like the one 2 articles below for Credit Kings), or sign something with the website you sign for so they can fax it to us.

We that this measure will provide more control to the dealer and avoid feeds issues.

Note: We don’t charge for feeds at all, so they are solely set up for the dealer’s benefit. We also don’t take money from any website company unless we decide to represent their products or merge our systems in which in that case we fully disclose it and present it as our product to sell/maintain/represent.

From now on I will try to get some feedback from a larger number of dealers before I make changes in the system so I don’t always focus on just a few opinions for changes. Please participate, all you have to do is read the question and click on one of the links.

The issue:

Marketting on sites like CL requires a different price strategy. You can’t have the same prices as what you have on Autotrader.com for example. CL is used in many cases as a “sure shot”, you can post a car right now for a certain price and the phone will ring inmediatelly.

The benefits:

It will give dealers more control on how the inventory shows on different sites and give more control over strategy.

The bad things:

You will have to manage another price field. You will have to check for those cars when you sell it for the higuer price to a client that came form your website for example.

How does it work right now?

The system grabs whatever price is on the Internet Price field and brings that to CL. Dealers have the abilty to change the CL price on the fly (just for that posting) but the system doesn’t store it.

Should we have a specific field in the system for Craig’s List price?

YES <<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>> NO

We had a few dealers complaining that they had cars that didn’t belong to them posted in their accounts so we checked the problem.

Since CL installed security measures to avoid spam, having a working account is kind of a privilege for many people–it takes hard work to get things set and done.

We found sites that will do a “pop under” so when you navigate thru the windows opened in your computer you may use one of this fake account log ins and think that you are getting in your CL account.

We took screen shots, then Jim put together a nice page that shows the differences between the real one and the fake one, click here to see it.

There is a new free site called Credit Kings of WA. They specialize on working with dealers to create inventory specific leads by working with social media and networking web sites.

They have allowed us to send inventory to their system for free.

For more information abot their programs please call:

Customer service: 1-866-906-7602

To approve this feed please click here, your inventory will not be otherwise sent to that site.

PGI is not affiliated in any way with any free sites unless noted.

All dealers running on PGILIST magazine will get this feature implemented for free (actually it is coming out in tomorrow’s amagzine).

As you can see in the screenshot, each car has an individual barcode to text that will give the customer all the photos of the car that you have in Diamondlot, as well as your email, phone number, web address, and physical location. It also comes with a little “contact app” included.

The system also has a code in the top right corner of the page that will give the customer your entire inventory on their cell phone.

All pages, displays, etc are mobile ready and will display properly on most smart phones (my friend Keith still has a flip phone but that is a completelly different issue).

Every time a customer text a car or the inventory pages to view them on their cell phone you will also get an email from the Autobase server with the customer’s cell phone number and the car they are looking at.

We just merged print with your Internet database so you can get a customer’s cell hpone from a magazine and into your email.

Batch updating of Vehicle Comments

This tool will show a different page when clicking to re- sort the comments. This is now fixed.

Disclaimer added

A new disclaimer for proper operation was added to the Batch updating of Vehicle Comments tool.

Update comments button added

We added a second “update” button to the top of the page to make updates easier.