Edmunds Rolls Out Consumer Car Dealer Pricing Platform

The car-shopping site launched its new Edmunds Express tool yesterday (Aug. 17) to provide car dealers with a customized way to authenticate pricing and information for their inventories for customers seeking third-party validation.

“Our dealer partners told us that they love using the data on our site because their customers trust our information, but when they’re working with buyers on the phone or in person, they quickly need that information without navigating through our website each time,” Edmunds President Seth Berkowitz said in a company release.

“Edmunds Express solves this problem. It’s a straightforward sales tool that features Edmunds’ most relevant pricing and data so that both dealers and shoppers can proceed with an easy, productive transaction.”

Through Edmunds Express, dealers can access Edmunds’ True Market Value (TMV) reports directly from a desktop, which can then be easily shared electronically or in person with shoppers. The report contains specific information related to a dealer’s inventory, such as the TMV price of the vehicle and current available customer cash incentives.

Edmunds Express also supports easier access to Edmunds’ trade-in appraisal and vehicle comparison tools. The Web-based tool can be customized with URLs specific to the dealership itself and is complementary for any of the 10,000 dealers within the Edmunds network.

“We’ve found that many of our highest quality shoppers trust Edmunds, and they are often armed with Edmunds information even before they step foot in our showroom,” said Dustan Turner, marketing director at Prime Motor Group in New England, in Edmunds’ press release.

With auto loans topping the $1 trillion mark for the first time in U.S. history, Americans are both buying and financing cars more.

Late last week, the New York Federal Reserve released data which estimates that on the whole American consumers are carrying about $12 trillion in total indebtedness, an amount that has ticked up by about $2 billion since Q2 2015.

Between April and June of this year, consumers grabbed around $119 billion in auto loans, a notable jump from the $95 billion taken out in loans in Q1. If all continues apace, the industry could pass the previous record of 17.4 million loans originated in the year 2000.

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To check out what else is HOT in the world of payments, click here.

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