Dealership Websites

Since DealerOn’s core service is our website product, we work with hundreds of dealers’ domains every day, and consider ourselves fairly expert in this area.  Dealers and their IT people may not always have much experience in this area– for most online companies, the only time you need to worry about your domain is when you register or renew it, UNLESS you’re about to lose your domain, and then you REALLY have to worry about your domain.

Your domain is your online brand and you have likely spent years, countless hours, and millions of dollars building the value of your domain name.  You’ve advertised your domain in print, TV, radio, search engines, online banner ads, email marketing campaigns, social media sites, and in online directories.  While the original selection of your domain may have been arbitrary, after building your domain brand for 15 years or more, it is now too valuable for you to lose.

Nevertheless, not a month goes by where I don’t talk to a dealership that’s in some jeopardy of having their ability to use a domain seriously impaired.  I’m going to briefly discuss your rights and recourse if your dealership ever finds itself in this situation and what you can do right now to ensure it doesn’t happen to you in the future.

Your Rights:

Your dealership has a valid legal claim to any domain name that someone has registered on your behalf while acting as your agent, UNLESS your website company’s contract or service agreement specifically states otherwise.  If you change website providers, you should not have any issue getting your prior provider to release your domains for transfer if they happen to be managing it or if they have registered it on your behalf.  DealerOn, for instance, does not prevent any current customer from transferring their domains, nor do we use any legal language impairing your ability to do so.  Your website company should not have any language in either their user agreement or their contract language providing them legal claim to your domain.

If your provider has legal control over your domain (they are listed as the registrant), and they refuse to transfer your domain for any reason, you should be aware of your rights.  First, they cannot put up a website themselves (see the Anti Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act) that in any way allows them or their registrar to profit from the website (this includes “parked pages” which usually have ads running on them).  These limits make it practically worthless for someone outside of your dealership to have control over the domain; they can only spite you by holding it.  The only instance in which they could continue using an active site on a domain you had been using in the past is if it contained only brand-agnostic words (EG- unitedstatesusedcars.com).

Your Recourse:

If you do get in a dispute with a website provider, marketing agency, former employee, or anyone else over a domain, there are many options available to you:

1. Contact the Registrar directly– If you can demonstrate to a Registrar (Go Daddy, Network Solutions, etc) that your business is clearly the business that should be in control of the domain (EG-your dealership is Cavalier Ford Lincoln and the domain is cavalierfordlincoln.com), the Registrar will have a process that you can go through to re-claim your domain.  It will usually require you to provide your letterhead, and document your state business license, among other things.  The Registrar has an incentive to help ensure that cybersquatting is not rewarded.
2. Submit a formal UDRP complaint to the Registrar – Registrars are required by ICANN to follow the Uniform Domain Name Resolution Policy (UDRP).  If a company is “cybersquatting” on your domain or holding it hostage, you should submit a formal complaint.
3. File a Federal Court Action or administrative proceeding to compel the company to turn the domain over to your dealership.

According to Mike Steger, a leading Intellectual Property Attorney, neither of the above processes will usually take more than a couple months, nor cost more than a few thousand dollars (which you may recover from the defendant).  Both the time and cost involved will likely pale in comparison to the time and effort you’ve put in to building your online brand.

What you can do RIGHT NOW

For every domain that your dealership uses, your dealership should be the listed “Registrant”.  You want to make sure that even if your marketing agency, your website provider, your IT director, or your Internet sales manager is the technical or administrative contact for your domain, that your dealership or ownership company is still the listed “Registrant”.  You can check the legal Registrant for your domains on any accredited Registrar’s website.    Here are a few good ones:

• www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jsp
• www.whois.net
• https://whois.domaintools.com/

Here’s an example from networksolutions.com/whois/index.jsp

Before you sign a website agreement with any provider, make sure you have a clear understanding of their policies regarding owning and controlling your dealership’s domain name.  Losing a URL that your dealership has built could cost your dealership millions of dollars to rebuild your online brand.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve had a few of our auto dealer website clients have asked what we are doing to keep up with the advances with HTML 5.  Since it seems to be a topic of concern for multiple dealers, I wanted to share what DealerOn is working on.

First, most people that are asking about HTML 5 are concerned about how their website will look on iPhones, iPads and other Apple devices.  Since Apple excluded Flash compatibility from their platforms, they are using HTML 5 as their preferred direction.

While DealerOn dealership websites do use some Flash, we are moving away from the technology.  When a site uses Flash, visitors to the site who don’t happen to have the right Flash version installed get a screen telling them to update their plug-in.   We’ve found that this dramatically increases bounce rates for a page or site.

Currently, Mobile devices constitute roughly 10-15% of a well-optimized dealer website.  Over half of this traffic is from devices that will not use Flash.  For a fee, DealerOn can build a completely Flash free site for those dealerships that see a large amount of their website traffic come from Apple products.

For others concerned about HTML 5, I want to point out that the technology is still classified as being under development.  It has not been released by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which is in charge of developing and instituting standards for the Internet.

DealerOn’s current major technology focus includes implementing all of the latest web technologies.  Once HTML 5 is released for stable public use and major web browsers start conforming to its standards, DealerOn will begin to ensure our websites are HTML 5 complaint, across the board.

As always, please feel free to contact DealerOn with any questions about our technologies, products, or online marketing tools.

True to its nature, the Internet is changing again.  2012 should see the emergence of new domain suffixes like .eco, .love, and .god.  And of course, this isn’t without some controversy.  This will open a ton of possible domains, which could either make the Internet more intuitive (you’d know what type of site you were going to if it have the domain suffix .god, for example) or confusing (who gets control of john.smith?).  There are currently 21 domain suffixes in use right now like .com, .org, and country suffixes.

A small non-profit organization, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), will be responsible for determining which sites have the rights to which domain suffixes.  The organization will start accepting applications from companies and governments, though the application process costs $185,000; organizations that are able to operate a domain also have to pay ICANN $25,000.  For controversial domains, ICANN plans to use “morality and public order” as their guidelines for approval.

I’m curious…what do you think of this opening up of domain suffixes?  Would you want your auto dealership website to have access to a .auto or .dealership suffix?  Even if it had a large cost attached to it?  Do you think it will make the Internet more intuitive or confusing?

Most auto dealerships have already realized that when their car dealer website takes too long to load, a lot of web users will click off and find what they are looking for on a different car dealership’s website.

Just in case the potential loss in sales hasn’t been incentive enough to ensure your dealer site loads quickly, Matt Cutts of Google has announced that Google is going to start taking the load time of a website as a factor in their search engine rankings algorithm, beginning sometime in 2010.

Aim for your each page to load in less than 10 seconds, maximum–the quicker the better.  This means you may have to limit the amount of flash you use on your site (flash also doesn’t rank as well in search engines), keep big files like images, auto-play videos, and sounds to a minimum, and use a car dealer website provider that builds fast loading sites.

The longer your site takes to load, the more web visitors will click off, the more conversions you will miss out on, and ultimately, the less cars your dealership will sell.  And starting soon, the lower you could rank in Google.

While I was at the NADA Convention in New Orleans this past weekend, the biggest news I heard was the announcement by General Motors (GM) that they plan to close 400 dealerships yearly until 2012.  According to Left Lane News, the company hasn’t decided what will determine which dealerships will be shut down, but “the automaker will base its decision on the age of the dealership, location, volume, and customer satisfaction.”

This is scary.  Not only do GM dealerships have to worry about having to close their doors because of the down economy and lack of sales, but it appears as though they will also have to worry about being shut down by their OEM.  While GM may not say so, you know that if your dealership can remain profitable and move more metal for your OEM than your competitors are, your chances of being shut down are drastically reduced.  If your dealership wants to increase the number of cars you sell, you need to make sure you can be found where your customers are looking: online.

Your dealership NEEDS to have an EFFECTIVE website.  Your customers are using the Internet to find their next vehicle; in fact, 80% of new vehicle buyers use search engines while researching their purchase.  If you don’t have a dealership website, you are missing out on 80% of potential sales.

Not only do you need a site, you need one that ranks well in search engine results.  Since only 10% of Google users ever click onto the second page of search results, if your website doesn’t appear on the first page, you’re missing out on 90% of potential sales.  42% of Google users will click on the first listing, so just being on the first page isn’t always enough.  You need to be at the top.

Sales are becoming more and more difficult to come by, so making sure your dealership can be found online is more important than ever before.  If your dealer site isn’t bringing leads and sales into your dealership, it’s time you rethink who your website provider is.  You can’t afford to lose any more potential sales.