Driving Stockturn and Generating Pricing Strategies for Used Cars

On 28 July, we did a webinar on Driving Stockturn and Generating Pricing Strategies for Used Cars hosted by Motor Trader with some great turnout and feedback. Huge thank you to our speakers, Neil Murphy, Chief Operating Officer at RWA Automotive, Paul Keatley, Client Development Director at AutoTrader and Craig Heathershaw, Chief Operating Officer at AvailableCar for bringing in great insights and some very practical advice. We also want to thank Bill Sherry, Publisher of Motor Trader, one of the leading auto-retail magazines in the UK, for facilitating this live session.

The webinar kicked off with Craig sharing his view on the challenges in the Used Cars marketplace from a retailer’s perspective – managing the stockturn and maximising margins at the same time is critical for moving the business forward. However, with over 5,000 cars in stock and price variations every day, driving their stockturn and profits has become difficult. What Craig and his team did to improve the situation was to use data and trust it. They use AutoTrader’s retail rating data as the baseline for their pricing strategy and integrate this data with RWA’s system. Since then, Craig has been getting daily discrepancy reports that show him cars that are over-priced and under-priced so his team can concentrate just on them without the need to manually check all 5,000 vehicles every single day, which would indeed be nearly impossible.

Next, Paul shared his insights from working with the top 50 dealer groups in the UK and how the AutoTrader Accelerator programme is complementing these corporates’ pricing strategies. He demonstrated the importance of Retail Rating, which is a measure of how desirable the vehicle is based on demand, supply, and days to sell, and how it is used for strategising. Those groups who use Accelerator data are turning their less desirable cars faster as well as generating additional profits on high desirability cars. Pricing vehicles correctly from day 1 will massively help drive stockturn. Paul also showed how much money was left on the table – was a 7-digit number!

Now that we have a good understanding of how AutoTrader Accelerator is working and how valuable its data is for dealers’ daily operations, another key to being able to drive efficiency and leave no money behind is to create a pricing strategy and execute on it. Neil showed some of the most useful reports that RWA’s PriceSmart tool provides – including those Craig just mentioned, and how RWA’s customers are using them in their everyday operations. For instance, in Craig’s case, with 5,000 vehicles in stock, PriceSmart is able to profile their entire forecourt in 60 seconds and automates exception reports to Craig’s team on a daily basis.

The Used Cars marketplace is extremely dynamic. With the market changing so rapidly, pricing strategies will need to be evaluated and tweaked to market conditions and this can all be done with the right data analytics tools. Neil also demonstrated RWA’s additional tool which helps buyers buy in the right stock.

There are a lot more details that were discussed in the webinar but we’re not able to cover here. If you missed out on the live webinar, you can still watch it on demand! Click here and watch it now. If you’re interested in anything mentioned/demonstrated in the webinar, contact us now or email auto@realworldanalytics.com, Neil and his team would love to have a chat with you! Or check out our other Business Intelligence solutions and customers’ success stories.