DealerOn Digital Dealer 2011

DealerOn is on the road this week at the Digital Dealer Conference in Orlando, FL. We are excited to talk with dealers in person not only about the great things we’re doing that can help them increase sales and profit, but also to understand the new challenges they’re facing in 2011.

One way that we’ll be helping dealers make more money in 2011 is with our new Service Website product. We will be unveiling our new Service Website offering at our booth (#100) during the show, so please stop by to see the demo.

The Service Website product will provide dealers with a dedicated website for their service department that is optimized for both search engines and to increase conversion rate. Not only will dealers be able to compete with general auto service centers on Google, but they will be able to generate many more service department appointments than ever before.

With this new product, dealers will have an entire website platform devoted to increasing the profitability of one of their most important profit centers—the service department. Over the last few months we’ve also rolled out some very exciting new aspects to our website platform, so if you’d like to find out how we’re continuing to double or triple our customers’ lead volumes, please stop by booth #100 and talk with one of our representatives.

We hope to see as many of our present and future partners in Orlando as possible this week!

Nissan Certified Website Provider

I am so excited to announce that DealerOn has been selected as a Certified Dealer Website Provider for Nissan North America (NNA).   This certification lets Nissan and Infiniti dealers who use DealerOn’s website and mobile platform know that their sites are NNA compliant and meet NNA’s high standards for performance.

In the first quarter 2011, NNA began evaluating the leading dealer website providers by collecting website analytics from car dealer website companies for their dealerships.  Using this information as well as the provider’s ability to supply regular data, analytics, support and compliant sites, NNA evaluated providers for inclusion in their certification program.

Nissan or Infiniti dealers looking for more information on the partnership between NNA and DealerOn or information on how to maximize their online leads and resulting sales can visit www.dealeron.com or call DealerOn at 877-543-4200.

All of us at DealerOn are very proud and honored to be recognized as a preferred website provider by Nissan North America.  We look forward to partnering with Nissan and Infiniti dealers across North America to help them to be more successful than ever before.

Automotive Domain Mastery and Ownership

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:

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.

DealerOn Does Napa

While in San Francisco for NADA earlier this month, DealerOn took the opportunity to treat some of our partners, colleagues, customers, and friends in the dealership community on a daylong excursion to the Napa Wine Valley.  We had an opportunity to enjoy world-class reserve wines straight from the barrel at the Cakebread and Frank Family wineries.  In between we squeezed in a gourmet lunch at Brix Restaurant in Calistoga.

We love creating events like this because they give us a chance to spend time with the people most important to our business — our auto dealer website customers and our partners.

Below are some pictures from the event.  We hope to have a chance to host you at an upcoming car dealer marketing event:

 

DealerOn HTML5 Compliancy

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.

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