DealersEdge Professional Forums

I have been on the fence about this program. As a matter of fact been on and off it twice. Seems like a no brainer for the future but every time the customer orders the wrong part or want to return it or etc etc its a huge issue. Today I dealt with a pretty unhappy customer that made me just say forget it but I feel like in the ecommerce world its inevitable I will be back.

Thoughts? have you all dealt with this?

We've been doing this since last November. It is another avenue of revenue. You must have a champion handle all the transactions, and they get the sales from ecommerce, so it is worth it to them. Unlike other GM programs, this one overall is easy to handle everything that happens, we have created a process for everything. We get sales from outside our area because the consumer picks us at their checkout (closer dealers don't do e-commerce).

If you want more specific details and processes, i would be happy to give.

We have only had 3 returns, they were easy to handle.

We started 04/18 thousands of dollars in sales. 1 return no problem. GM pays couple days after they ship. They do not pay on parts invoices it goes to the controller and washes the counter ticket.

The returns that we have had are certainly less than what we typically experience with in-store customers, so from that perspective I like it. Started out very slow, but over the past few months ours has grown substantially. Other advantage is about half of our orders have been picked up or installed at our store. So it has been a nice traffic builder for parts and service of customers that I feel we never would have seen.

We just went live a couple weeks ago. Only one order so far, and it had a wrong part on it. No fault of the customer; wrong part returned to the ADI. All taken care of pretty easily. Now if GM could just invoice more clearly, things would be stellar!

We are going live sometime before the end of July. Myself and Parts Manager will be handling it. I am not sold on program, GM seems to always put the cart before the horse and throw programs out before they are ready so we will see.

We were reluctant too, but since we already pay the fee, we went ahead with it. I have seen quite a few orders through it that we probably would have lost due to where the customer was from in relationship to us. It has worked well for us so far, been about 6 moths or so.

Our owner decided to stay away from it, too many fees.

We've done it for a little over a year now.

It is a way to bring extra revenue in, but I've had a couple issues. Mainly because GM backordered something and didn't tell anyone what happened. A couple phone calls fixed that relatively quickly. I now get an email as soon as someone orders an ecommerce item.

It was quite a sinking feeling listening to an upset customer because he thought that we hadn't ordered his part, yet his card was charged that same day that he ordered the part. I could only imagine the look on his face when I told him I knew nothing about his order. I may as well have cut the blue wire when I was supposed to cut the red wire. That was a fun one to explain. And it was also a very heated phone call to the ecommerce people to get things sorted out.

When I was with my previous dealer we did the ecommerce accessories. I didn't want to do it at first, but after the first year it was a cash cow! All I needed to do was push paper and collect. We grossed in the first year an additional $35g in sales that we would not have had if we didn't do it. Returns? 2 or 3 on the year, all accepted back no questions asked.. The only issue is getting it set up, it takes a bit of time and you need to get banks involved etc. Luckily my office girls handled it all for me...