On Going Commission... Forever?

Hi Jason,

I ran a website for a couple of years and sold advertising to used car dealers. I offered the dealers a special of 8 cars for $150 per month and $10 per car (per month) after that. But we updated the cars every week.

These guys go to auctions every week. So there is always work getting the pictures and data for the new vehicles they acquire and then the database needs to have the ones that have sold removed, and updated with the new ones. You won't get a lot of repeat traffic if people keep clicking on cars that have been sold or no longer available. Even though we updated the database weekly, we still had people complaining that cars they saw on the website were already sold by the time they called the dealer.

My website had a backend so that sales people could update the cars themselves. I could even assign used car dealers their own account so they could do the updates themselves -- which was a big mistake. (Don't fall into this one)

My problem was getting sales people who could sell. Good sales people always have lots of offers, and trying to train someone new to close sales isn't the easiest task. I spent a lot of my time riding around with the sales people closing sales for them.... which almost killed my web development business -- I wasn't putting the time into it.

On Gordon's suggestion I wrote an eBook about my experience. You can see it here: http://carsite-marketing.com

Don't buy it though. I don't promote this any longer, and the information is old and not up to date with today's standards. If you want a copy of it, email me and I'll send it to you at no cost, if you think it might help.

Best Regards,
Steve MacLellan