How LotLinx Took the Automotive Industry by Storm

If you’re in the automotive industry, chances are you had not heard of LotLinx this time last year. 2014 has shown incredible growth and there’s a very clear reason for this: it just makes sense.

The concept that they brought to the industry is a simple one. Take shoppers who are searching 3rd-party websites and bring them to a dealership’s vehicle details page when they find a vehicle to consider. This might seem like an obvious way of doing things, but in the automotive industry, this is not a common thing.

The majority of 3rd-party websites that list car dealer inventory do not drive visitors to the dealership that has the vehicle. Instead, they keep the shoppers on their website in hopes of collecting their contact information and selling it to interested parties such as other dealers, other 3rd party sites, or manufacturers. This model has been in place for a while and has been in conflict with shoppers’ (and dealers’) interests because it doesn’t always connect the two interested parties. In other words, just because someone fills out a form on a 3rd-party site for a particular vehicle doesn’t mean that they’ll be contacted by the dealership that has the vehicle in stock.

With LotLinx, the idea is to cut out the middleman. Rather than trying to collect data from consumers, they drive traffic directly to the vehicle of interest on the dealer’s website. This means that consumers are only talking to the dealership that has the vehicle they want and it means that dealerships do not have to share their leads with other interested parties.

The company recently brought in several industry veterans to manage and continue their growth, including former Subaru Chief Marketing Officer Dean Evans. As the model grows in scope and more dealers take advantage of the solution, it should open up the transparency levels for consumers and help to connect the people who have a vehicle with the people that want the vehicle.