Spoil Sport

Once again, another dealership ruins it for the rest of us. Recently, a customer in Anchorage Alaska was the winner of a 2009 Nissan GT-R on eBay Motors with a bid of $55,100. Now, the dealer (Honda of San Marcos) is refusing to sell the vehicle to them. The bugaboo: It was a No-Reserve Auction.

This is another shining example of how a dealership participates in a platform without knowledge, training, or guidance, and gives our industry a black-eye. The dealership is claiming that they didn’t know about the Reserve feature and our demanding the winning bidder purchase the vehicle for $4,000 more. To me, I think the dealer should have to eat the difference and THAT is the price to pay for not knowing.

I urge dealers to not get involved in platforms (eBay, Craigslist, Social Media) if they DON’T know what they are doing? Read a blog, seek guidance, ask someone from your 20 group, go onto DealerElite and hunt for someone that works for eBay to ask them a question… anything. But don’t try to do it yourself without any preparation as it will always come back to bite you. There are endless discussions and experts that can point you in the right direction. Don’t involve yourself in a new marketing channel without guidance.

Now that the dealership is standing their ground, the winning bidder has been taking his disappointment to the blogs and getting a heck of a backing. (Read the article here - Autoblog article about Honda of San Marcos vs. eBay Motors .

What do you think? Do you think the customer should pay more money for the vehicle after following all of the rules, paying a pretty penny, and STILL winning the vehicle? Or do you believe the dealership should have to suck it up and learn and lesson?

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Comment by Pete Grimm on August 11, 2011 at 10:31am: Dealers participate in too many auctions and enter into too many contracts to claim ignorance of either the nature of the auction or the binding nature of the contract. Darrin Smith also makes the most important point. $4k is just not worth all the negative publicity the dealership is experiencing (an giving to the auto industry another black eye in the process).
This brings up another thought. In 26 years as a dealer, I rarely had to employ my lawyer to do anything. The reason was simple. On the rare occasions I would get a call from a lawyer, inevitably I would be asked, "Who is your lawyer?" My response always was, "Why do you want to know?" Lawyers want to deal with lawyers in almost all small disputes. They know that a simple telephone conversation can wind up costing us hundreds of dollars. It is part of the legal blackmail they sometimes use to get us to settle with their clients. It works because, like the $4K loss in this case, it is simply not worth the hassle to engage in a legal fight over peanuts. I would encourage every dealer to realize this, force the lawyer to deal with you personally, and become proactive at the outset of every legal dispute. Get to the bottom of it and solve it, personally, quickly, and as cheaply as possible. Doing anything else can/will cost a lot more in the long run.

Comment by James L. Geary on August 11, 2011 at 10:30am: Hard to believe a franchise dealer selling a $50K plus vehicle does not know the rules.

Guess "Buyer Be Aware" holds true again..

Comment by Steve Ganz on August 11, 2011 at 10:29am: How much money do we spend advertising to our base, and their holding out for $4000.00. That's too bad, it will cost them 10 times the amount with bad publicity.

Sell it and move on, lesson learned.

Comment by Darrin Smith on August 11, 2011 at 9:30am: While they can claim ignorance on the processes involved with eBay; they should at least be pros at advertising and putting a positive spin on an error. Had they honored the deal they would have spent $4000 on having a customer rave about the deal from the highest rooftops. Instead this dealer will face the negative publicity and the loss of tens of thousands in lost sales because of it. shame on them.

Comment by Ernie Rizzolo on August 11, 2011 at 9:26am: Hard to believe a dealer doesn't know what a no "reserve auction is" Sell the car to the customer!

Comment by Mike Warwick on August 11, 2011 at 9:22am: eBay clearly states that both you and the customer are entering into a contract to buy and sell the vehicle. Do we really want to go down the road of tearing up contracts that we don't like? If there is a dealer out there who doesn't understand that a social media savvy irrate consumer can cost your business hundreds of thousands of dollars, they need to wake up before they make a costly mistake like this. We have access to too much information at our disposal to make these kinds of mistakes.

Comment by David Martin on August 11, 2011 at 9:17am: This one is a no-brainer

Comment by Adam Thrasher on August 11, 2011 at 9:09am: Sell the car. Eat the difference and don't post cars on eBay until you have a grasp on the whole auction concept. The guy who won the auction is a Motor Trend forum user. Apparently Motor Trend contacted the dealer due to his forum post and now they are going to honr the price. Too bad this shows up on page 1 of a google search for honda of san marcos...

WOT » GT-R for $55100? Dealer Latest to Refuse to Honor eBay Auction

Comment by Ron Carl on August 11, 2011 at 8:25am: Let's see what is better, suck it up do the deal and be a hero or have the customer negatively blog you to death and have everyone in the automotive community talk about you on DE and be a zero? I wonder if they know this is even happening to them...

Comment by Joe Hebert on August 11, 2011 at 8:08am: ignorance is not an excuse!!!