LiteHouseAuto.com Success Story

I just wanted to send you a letter thanking you for your service and relate to you where we have come from and what your service has done for us.

I have been in the car business for many years and have always made a good living at it, however I had never found a way to take my dealership from being a good dealership to being a great dealership. I had a good base of repeat customers, my advertising seemed to bring in some new business, but I knew I could do more.

At this point I started hearing from my customers that it would be nice to be able to see my inventory from the Internet. Most people do not want to stop in every week to see what new inventory I had. After hearing this enough times I decided to check it out and see what was involved in getting my own website.

What started out as an easy task of just getting a simple website that I could have my cars on turned out to be a monumental undertaking, I found that most web designers while very willing to build the site really did not know what I needed as they were not familiar with this industry. While I did find a couple of designers that knew enough about the car industry I was shocked to find out the price this was going to cost. I had figured that it may cost me $1,000 to maybe even $1,500, but when I started getting the estimates back and seeing that figures from $5,000 to $12,000 just to get my simple website up and running!

I was more than a little taken back by the idea of having to spend this much on a means of advertising without even knowing if it would help my business. I ended up going with a designer who knew the industry and could make a website where I could add the inventory to the site so I would not have to pay the designer for each car I wanted to add.

I then spent the next 3 months going back and forth with the designer over the details of the website, for the most part I was just trying to guess my way since I have never done this before. But then 3 months and $6,000 later I had a website.

This website did everything that the designer promised it would and it started bringing in more customers. We were getting customers from places we had never even advertised to and they would just walk in already knowing the car they wanted to test drive!

However there was a problem, every time I wanted to update the website to put on a new staff member or take off someone that had left I would end up paying large amounts of money to the web designer. When I would have a big promotion going on I would question whether is was worth it paying the designer to put it on the website and then pay them to take it off again. Each little change I needed would cost at least $75 and many times would be at least $200. Not to mention that by the time I would think of what needed to be on the website and then get a hold of the designer and then the time it would take them to get it on the website. What would end up being on the website would not be the same thing I had thought of.

This being said the website would end up costing me at least $250 per month and during busy seasons when we needed more updates it could cost us over $500 per month!

Also as I looked around on the Internet I could see other car dealers getting new sites that had much better features than what I had as my site was getting to be a couple of years old. I shuttered at the thought of having my website redone. I did not have the time or the money to go through the whole process again!

I then found out about your service, it seemed a bit too good to be true as the costs were much lower than what I had come accustomed to and it looked like you even offered more services! I ended up signing up with you and within 2 days everything was setup and running. The tools we now have on our website make us much more efficient and give us a much more powerful sales force!

Now instead of trying to decide if it is worth the money to have an update done I just log in and put it in. I can put new information on our website while it is still fresh in my mind. Also it is much more effective not having to relay the information through two or three other people before it is added to the website. I can just log into our admin section and do what I need, once I have the information there I can then tweak it as many times as I need to get everything just the way I want it!

Another feature that I love is that my website is never out of date, I have noticed that as new technologies come out they are added into this system and I get them free of charge! Now not only do I have the ability to keep up my current website but I don't have to worry about paying large sums of money to have my website redone to keep up with technology!

Also this system is great because I can delegate things such as adding cars to the website, or putting up a new promotion, or even sending out a customer newsletter to my other employee's taking the burden of the website off my shoulders!

I must say that just having a set cost of what my website will be is also a big relief, I am no longer paying for a designer to update my site.

I am now finding that a large percent of our business is coming from our website. Our customers will log onto our website each week from home and check out our inventory, see what we have listed on our redtag specials page, and see if we have any specials going on. When we get a car that the customer is interested in they come in already knowing what they want. We have even had customers who had started the loan process before they stepped onto our car lot! Our sales staff loves having the website, while they are talking to a customer on the phone they can direct the customer right to a particular car online!

Also new customers will check out our website and be able to “Meet” our staff before they even step out of their house, this gives the customers much more confidence in coming to us to do business! Now days I don't know how we made it without a website, and I now know that having the right tools for the job makes all the difference in the world!

Once again thank you for giving me the service and tools to make my business so much more effective and successful!

Sincerely
Rodney Weidner
President