10:48 am, April 29, 2024
A used car dealer has explained how a strong domain name has helped his business to establish its own in-house car buying service which is being offered up to ten vehicles a day.
Stephen Bogan, of James Glen Car Sales runs ‘We Won’t Buy Any Car’ alongside the outfit’s traditional sales unit in Airdrie
The recognisable and memorable URL has allowed the company to build its brand to such a level that it now longer has to pay for advertising.
Despite that, the operation still has leads flooding in every day and Bogan has put the success down to hard work.
Appearing on the latest episode of the Car Dealer Podcast, he said: ‘We were lucky enough to have a very, very long 22-year relationship with Grassicks BMW, which was my Dad’s baby. He nurtured that relationship over the years and we got an incredible supply of fantastic cars from them.
‘Unfortunately, as we all know, these family owned franchises are all beginning to get snapped up and bought over by the bigger groups and that’s what happened.
‘We always knew that it was going to happen one day and our supply would literally vanish overnight. They were bought over and we lost our supply overnight.
‘Then, I was out washing a car one day and I was listening to We Buy Any Car advert and I thought: “Wow, can you imagine having to buy every car?”
‘I just thought “Hmmm. We Won’t Buy Any Car”. I went online and checked and the domain name wasn’t registered.
‘I did that about ten years ago and registered .com, .net, .org and all the rest of it but forgot to register “We Don’t Buy Any Car”. After a couple of years someone else registered that and they’ve got their own similar thing down south.
‘There are millions of cars to buy and we only need a tiny, tiny percentage of them.
‘The good thing is the URL makes people smile and if you annoy somebody or if you make somebody laugh, you’re more memorable and because of that, we’re easier to remember.
‘I thought this was the case of getting this URL and sticking it on the website, but that was far from the case. I had to learn how to do Google AdWords, which was murder but once we got a landing page, a relevant score and key words and everything sorted it was phenomenal.
‘Now we don’t advertise at all and it’s all referrals and word of mouth.’
Bogan added: ‘[We get offered] ten [cars] a day. But don’t think we price ten to get five. You price ten a day for three days and get none.
‘It’s a long long game and you get some rather unhappy replies back from people – especially with what we’re finding at the minute.
‘A lot of people have paid peak price and also financed the full amount. It’s now the day of reckoning. Prices are on their way back down again but finance settlement hasn’t followed.
‘We’re trying to buy cars that are worth £15,000 and people want £20,000 and it’s like you’re the bad guy because you’ve given them the bad news.
‘We are very, very privileged to have our own in-house car buying service but took years to get it to work, and it still takes a lot of man-hours to make it work but I’d rather do that than buy at auction.’
The Car Dealer Podcast sees an industry guest join our hosts to discuss the motor trade’s biggest headlines of every week.
Among the topics up for discussion in the latest episode were the launch of Cazoo’s new digital marketplace, job losses at Pendragon and the government’s approach to EVs
A full list of the stories can be found here. You can listen to all episodes of the Car Dealer Podcast on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
