Q3 has been an eventful one here at Spidersnet, and our team has been hard at work on a couple of exciting projects. We’re not ready to fill you in on these just yet, but there are a few developments coming that we think you’ll be very excited to hear about in the near future!
In the meantime, we’ve also made some improvements to Autopromotor – smoothing out a few bumps, and making it run more efficiently to save you time. On top of this, we’ve set up a couple of brand new feed partners – one of which has proven to be incredibly popular with our dealers so far.
Take a look below for a full rundown of what we’ve been up to in Q3.
Facebook Marketplace Feed set up
In Q2 we announced that our Facebook Marketplace Feed was on the horizon. It’s now up and running and has already been switched on for over 50 dealerships. If you have yet to start feeding your stock to Facebook Marketplace then what are you waiting for?
The Facebook Marketplace Package in a nutshell:
- 30 day FREE trial
- Then only £25+VAT P/M
- Enquiries through Facebook Messenger
- List as a dealership
- No contract
- Cancel anytime
…
The Facebook Marketplace hit people’s screens for the first time in 2016 with the goal of helping Facebook’s users buy and sell locally using the platform. It’s grown and grown since then, and is now a bustling marketplace that you can utilise to sell your cars.
This package allows you to put all of your stock in front of your target audience on Facebook Marketplace. You can send all of your vehicles with ease, without having to lift a finger. Once a potential customer enquires on one of your cars, you’ll receive a message via Facebook Messenger, where you can respond, arrange a viewing, and liaise with the customer with ease.
BuyaCar feed is now set up
In Q3 we also rolled out our brand new feed to unique marketplace BuyaCar – a feed partner with a twist! BuyaCar only list stock from car dealerships, and don’t allow private sellers to advertise.
BuyaCar in a nutshell:
- It’s completely free to list with BuyaCar.
- BuyaCar purchase your vehicle from you.
- They deliver the vehicle to your customer on your behalf.
- You can now reach a national audience, selling your stock to customers hundreds of miles away.
- BuyaCar receives 900,000 visitors each month.
- 1 million subscribers across their different motoring channels.
It’s how BuyaCar manage the sale of your stock that sets them apart from their competitors. When a customer decides to purchase a vehicle, it’s actually BuyaCar that buys the car from you. They then handle the delivery of the vehicle, and sell it on to the customer on your behalf. This means that BuyaCar don’t deliver leads, they bring you direct sales.
This also means that you can reach that ever-growing audience of car buyers who only want to transact online. And, furthermore, you’re also able to reach a wider audience of buyers from up and down the UK thanks to their delivery service. BuyaCar’s average sale is in excess of 160 miles from the dealership.
Autopromotor Updates
We have also continued to make adjustments, updates, and improvements to Autopromotor. Here are some of the main updates that you may find useful:
Password Changes
We’ve made a number of changes to the password fields including making the requirements a little less strict. We take security seriously but some dealers thought that the requirements (minimum eight characters, number, lower-case letter, upper-case letter, and special character) were a bit too heavy. So we have now loosened the requirements meaning you now only need to enter at least six characters, including at least one letter and one number.
Changes to de-activating broadcast options
One of the many improvements we’ve made to the new Autopromotor is sharing the ability for dealers to update key information with ease. This means being able to edit basic details such as company name, phone number, opening hours and Broadcasting destinations without needing to contact the Spidersnet team.
However, we received a few reports from a number of our customers that it was too easy to de-activate broadcast options. This was an issue as it would stop feeding vehicles to selected destinations. In order to fix this we’ve added a series of prompts which ask you to confirm key actions such as disabling a dealership-wide broadcast option. This is one of a number of changes relating to broadcasting which we have planned over the coming months.
Editing ads is now quicker and easier
We’ve made tweaks to streamline the process of editing adverts on Autopromotor. And now, thanks to these edits, you can log in to Autopromotor and make edits quickly and efficiently, saving you time. Firstly, we have removed a number of error notifications which were appearing under certain circumstances. By removing these, we’re making the whole process run more smoothly.
We have also made some improvements to the mobile and tablet versions of Autopromotor to allow you to edit vehicle info easier no matter which device you’re using. And, finally, we’ve made improvements to the way images are handled by Autopromotor, which you can read about in the next point.
Image updates and improvements
As well as improving the way you can edit your ads, we’ve also made some image updates and improvements. Autopromotor now automatically resizes uploaded images to ensure that the files aren’t too big. This means upload speeds will be faster, as will the image load time on the live website. This will save you time, and make your website images load more quickly, making your dealership appear more professional to customers.
We were also seeing some issues arise regarding the reordering of images. So some dealers were changing the order of their images on adverts, only for that order to be jumbled up once saved. However, we’ve now tackled this issue, and all image reordering will work as intended allowing you to choose the exact order in which your vehicle images appear.
Previously, some images were being stretched out of proportion. This error has now been dealt with and all images will appear as they should from now on. It’s worth noting that the ideal image ratio for your adverts is 4:3, and we’d always encourage our dealers to upload images in this ratio.