RefreshClassifieds

Autotrader.com has launched a new website focused on their Dealer business. One of the key components of the Automotive Classified business is providing Dealers with the ability to effectively advertiser their vehicles. While the typical consumer may advertise and sell a vehicle ever 3-4 years, successful Dealers will need to advertise and sell thousands of vehicles per year. Its no surprise to see Autotrader.com focusing on this aspect of its business an creating a purpose built site.

With the new Dealers.Autotrader.com site provides a Dashboard for Dealers to quickly see their inventory and vehicle listings. They can make changes to any listing using its simple web interface including the vehicle photos which can be one of the more difficult aspects of the Automotive ad creation. Most consumers expect to see multiple photos and keep track of each photo for each vehicle can be a time consume process. The site also lets the dealer choose between a variety of ad sites and packages. Dealers can also track procpective customers through through the sites lead management tools.

AutoTrader.com is one of the most dominate websites in the US and has been very successful winning advertising dollars from Dealers that have traditionally been print focused. With these changes we expect to see Autotrader.com continue to be a dominate player.

Darby Sieben recently wrote about , Canada’s largest directory launching the ability to save directory listings to a variety of social bookmarking sites. The most interesting component is the ability to post the listing in Facebook. Facebook in Canada is extremely popular and until recently Toronto, Canada was the largest geographic network in Facebook. Some estimates put the Facebook market penetration at 10% of the Canadian population so its no surprise to see large sites like Yellowpages.ca trying to get in on the action.

The Yellowpages.ca works fairly well but was very slow during our testing. Once you find a listing in Yellowpages.ca you can choose to save into most of the popular bookmarking sites or Facebook. The Facebook integration is in the form of a post which is fairly limited and doesn’t take advantage of any of the new features available in the new Facebook Developer Platform. The Yellowpages.ca branding is also very dominating, even including the TM where possible. It would have been good see this more subdued to encourage more use.