Edmunds.com Launches Pricing Validation Tool

Edmunds.com released a third-party pricing validation tool today called “Edmunds Express.” Edmunds believes that this could help consumers who want to validate vehicle prices while on the lot. Customers work with dealer staff to research price info using this tool.

Edmunds.com President Seth Berkowitz offered DrivingSales News insight into their new pricing validation system. In an interview, Berkowitz explained, “The basic idea was how do we get snack or bite-sized data pieces that dealers are using already in a much quicker fashion that doesn’t require them to navigate the consumer website when all they really want to do is jump in with their stock numbers and get this price in front of the consumer to start that conversation.”

According to Edmunds, this product was created with input from their 10,000 Edmunds dealer customers. Apparently, many of them use Edmunds.com during the sales process to look up items such as True Market Value. Berkowitz said that when dealers have hopped on Edmunds.com to look into pricing info with customers, it hasn’t always been a seamless process. However Berkowitz believes that he his organization has found a potential solution to this issue.

“Using the Edmunds website in that context was an imperfect experience because it wasn’t designed for that purpose,” Berkowitz told DrivingSales News. “So we said why don’t we just build a custom experience with a URL for every dealership that could be bookmarked and sit on sales peoples desktops, laptops, iPads…they expressed that they already use this in their sales process and now we’re providing them with this free tool to just make it easier for them to go about doing that.” This tool, which Edmunds reports will be going to their existing customers free of cost, provides access to Edmunds.com TMV reports as well as trade-in appraisal and vehicle comparison tools.

When a customer comes into your store, how do you interact with them if they have a question about price shopping? Do you have a process in place to help your consumer do their research on your lot and with your staff verses on their own somewhere else? Finally, What do you make of this new initiative by Edmunds? Do you think that it will prove to be an efficient tool?