Auto Mall


The Auto Mall, developed in 1995, was cutting edge technology invented by John Hentrich when he founded WorldWideWheels.com. John has always been a car-lover, particularly fond of foreign sports cars like Lamborghini, Maserati and Porsche. In his spare time (before his kids came along - he now has three of them), John loved to browse the Chicago Tribune classifieds, looking at sports cars for sale and dreaming of one day owning one of those pricey and maintenance-intensive beauties. (He now has two of them!)

John was frustrated because of the limited number of the postings and, moreover, because he would have had to drive miles to see the cars. A "techno-geek," John had been tracking the research and development of a new means of information dissemination called the world wide web, with connectivity provided by the internet. In late 1994, after completion of the Mosaic browser by a team of "major techno-geeks" at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a small number of web-sites were being posted (and tracked by John). The light bulb was lit!

John immediately began writing code for a website that could: Most dealers now have their own website (as did most Chicagoland dealers by early 1997), but that doesn't thwart the attractiveness or profitability of the Auto Mall concept. This evidenced by the 1999 sale of Auto Mall for an outlandish multiple of EBITDA (cash flow). Why was the Auto Mall attractive after the deployment of auto dealer websites? Because John had created a virtual critical mass of inventory that made it simple for consumers to see every car in their market that was available. No dealer website could do that. No one was willing to take the risk that a car buyer would go directly to his website when worldwide wheels could let him see every car in the entire market!

This same concept will work in your market. Once implemented, you are tied to IMPI's ongoing technological improvements (initiated by suggestion from staff and from customer requests). Equally as important: your dealers will become addicted to the benefits of this site. IMPI has found that worldwidewheels.com and riverbender.com have experienced less than a 3% attrition rate.

Note: IMPI bundles the Auto Mall and Classifieds as one "Product/Service" and sells the combination for a single, affordable monthly price.
Questions You Might Have
    1. How much will this cost me? About $500/month all in (See Contract)
    2. How do I convince the dealers that this is an advertising cost they should spend? Point out that yours is the only auto mall in your market where buyers can view all cars of all dealers from the comfort of their homes. Ask the dealer if he can afford to post multiple pictures of each car in the newspaper - or if any radio station can give him suitable advertising for every auto on his lot.
    3. How do I work with dealers to make this all happen - updates, pictures, car data, etc. I have limited resources? It depends. Most dealers use automated inventory systems with information assembled by a third party company often called a "Sticker Company". The Sticker Company takes photographs of new inventory (often 4 or 5 per vehicle) and gathers standard data (year/make/miles, etc.) and puts it in electronic format for insertion into that dealer's website. This information is sent directly from the Sticker Company to IMPI for updates to your Auto Mall. For Dealers that don't use Sticker Companies, this data is provided to IMPI by the Dealer itself.
    4. How do I get started? Look at the Contract and make a list of questions you have about the IMPI opportunities. Then, Give Paul Coates a call and he will guide you through a very simple process and hold your hand while you work with IMPI staff to get your pages up and running on your existing website.
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