Digital car auction: Sell trade-ins quickly and transparently

by Oguz Özgüler

Modern car auctions help car dealerships to market trade-ins quickly and with optimum returns. This saves effort and reduces downtime. 

Trade-ins continue to be an important tool in customer acquisition at dealerships. Often buyers can only be convinced by a good offer for their "old" final. But what then?

What does one do as a dealer, if the trade-in is not a well-kept young car of a regular customer, but a copy, which does not fit so at all to the own assortment? Foreign brands and older vehicles are neither crowd pullers, nor do they fit the clientele of the own brand. 

How does a dealer sell off these trade-ins best? Sales often has little interest in trade-ins. For management, they are both an opportunity and a risk. You can use them to improve the return on the overall business or lose money by marketing the trade-in too poorly.

Marketing trade-ins individually has rarely been worthwhile

Local used car dealers buy everything if the price is only low enough, but prefer to look for the filet pieces from the inventory. Packages of several vehicles are therefore intended to bundle the attractive vehicles with those that are more difficult to market. For the management it is usually difficult to estimate, which potential market value trade-ins have and whether these can be marketed well.

Local buyers create the vehicles fast from the yard, this does not result however in the ideal yield per vehicle. Here, the company loses potential revenue with each sale. Today, there are more modern ways to handle remarketing for trade-ins digitally, with more transparency, less stress and more revenue. 

With set criteria, car dealerships can decide at the trade-in stage how to proceed with different categories of vehicles in each case and what should happen after the purchase. Is this a case for the second row in their own yard? Is this an interesting object for a local dealer? Or should the vehicle be picked up at the end of the month together with many others on the big transporter? Dealers here still lack the reassuring certainty of being able to find a suitable buyer for each vehicle. Or are there other options?

Here, targeted online auctions with integrated transaction processing are an ideal way to find a suitable reseller for each vehicle and achieve the maximum sales price at each auction. Digital remarketing platforms such as CarOnSale help dealers quickly find suitable buyers for their vehicles via car auctions - from all over Europe. This makes package deals a thing of the past.

Market trade-ins

The service in online remarketing

The key lies in professional car auctions. This allows car dealers to expand their circle of buyers and market vehicles that do not fit into the range quickly and transparently. Downtimes are thus minimized. Instead of handing over many vehicles below value to the few local buyers who will literally buy anything - as long as it is cheap enough - dealers can use car auctions to find exactly those buyers who are looking for this type of vehicle. 

The term "auction" could create the impression that dealers here are exposed to the bidders' willingness to buy alone. But today's online auctions no longer have anything to do with classic car exchanges on a gravel lot of earlier times.

Instead, car auctions like CarOnSale offer comprehensive service, their own evaluations of the vehicle's condition and potential buyers from all over Europe. Thanks to the evaluation service for dealers, it is documented exactly how much the trade-ins are worth. With car auctions on the Internet, car dealers can easily optimize the yield: 

Tips for effective online car auctions

A neutral assessment of the condition allows potential buyers to accurately estimate the possible resale value and the cost of possible preparation before the auction. Buyers do not like surprises, such a vehicle assessment provides clarity here and eliminates the uncertainty factor, which depresses prices. Also the car dealer can recognize exactly, which equivalent value has the trade-in on the basis of the transparent evaluation. 

If the dealer takes over the reconditioning before the evaluation and the auction itself, increases the chances further to sell a vehicle in the best condition to a good revenue. 

Not least, the running time of the online auction also plays a major role. Fast-moving, attractive vehicles immediately find numerous interested parties. More exotic vehicles have a smaller circle of potential buyers and should be given a longer auction duration to get the desired appreciation and find an interested reseller. 

Online auctions: Market trade-ins without effort

At CarOnSale, dealers can conveniently use the entire chain of remarketing trade-ins with one service. From the independent service for the vehicle valuation to the creation of the auction ad for the vehicle to the payment processing

This significantly reduces the effort for the marketing of used vehicles, while at the same time providing ideal processing for buyers and sellers. The buyer knows exactly what he is getting and pays what the car is actually worth, without an "uncertainty discount", as is common in blind auctions. 

Even after the sale, CarOnSale takes care of all process steps. Thus, the seller does not have to worry about anything, because CarOnSale takes care of the payment processing, the organization of the transport and takes care of possible complaints. 

This allows car dealerships and dealers to market trade-ins with the best return via car auctions, without having to go through the hassle that is otherwise common with individual sales. At the same time, trade-ins become transparent for the dealership: downtimes are shortened to a few days through digital marketing via car auctions, and yet the vehicles still achieve the best possible yield in each case thanks to clean documentation.