Cars.com Wants All the Reviews, Plans to Acquire DealerRater

Steph Willems
by Steph Willems

If sales and service reviews were gold, Cars.com will soon the the richest third-party shopping website in all the land.

Cars.com plans to buy DealerRater, making it the largest soundboard of criticism and praise for dealers, salespeople and servicing in the industry, Automotive News reports.

Details of the purchase haven’t been released, but the deal is expected to close at the end of August. Once wrapped up, Cars.com will be able to bolster its own reviews (and new and used vehicle listings) with 14 years of sales and service feedback from DealerRater’s information bank.

In a statement, Cars.com CEO Alex Vetter said the acquisition positions his site as the one to beat. Speaking to Automotive News, he touched on the importance of user reviews when buying a vehicle.

“Online reviews are becoming more critical than ever in all shopping categories, but even more so in the auto category,” Vetter said. “[Consumers] trust reviews as much as they do their family and friends.”

DealerRater, founded by Chip Grueter in 2002, sees 14 million hits a month, and hosts about 2.5 million reviews. Earlier this year, it launched its CustomerConnect tool to showcase the best salespeople at certain dealers. Cars.com bowed in 1998, and currently has about 1.5 million reviews.

Gary Tucker, who took on the role of CEO at DealerRater in 2014, said both sites have a “strong strategic alignment.”

Last year, J.D. Power ranked Cars.com as the second best third-party vehicle shopping site, behind NADA guides, in terms of overall customer satisfaction. The site’s ranking was well above the industry average.

Steph Willems
Steph Willems

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  • Kvndoom Kvndoom on Jul 27, 2016

    Cars.com has turned into a steaming pile. Half the time their search results page hangs on a spinning circle. They used to be good. If the #1 use of your website is searching for cars, then you damn well should make sure that part of it works.

  • Speedlaw Speedlaw on Jul 27, 2016

    OK, I thought it was just me who was having problems. Cars.com needs to rollback the site software about a year. On line reviews are good, but you need to ignore the top and bottom, and read the middle reviews. If you want to lose your mind, read reviews of any hotel or vacation spot. Half are posted by friends of the owner and the other half are by the competition, so does the hotel have a great staff, clean rooms, and a view of the city, or did you die at the intake desk in a dirty lobby while the hotel was taken over by an onion-eater convention, with bedbugs ?

  • Mtmmo Mtmmo on Jul 27, 2016

    Their mobile app is the worst I've ever used. Search hang-ups and the filter functionality rarely works properly. But don't worry they'll hit you with multiple pop-up ads and ask a dozen times if you want to provide feedback all in the first five minutes. Cars.com mobile app is awful.

  • Zip89123 Zip89123 on Jul 27, 2016

    Dealer rater is so polluted with employee's pumping up the ratings it's the equal of used toilet paper. Yelp is so much better.

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