ive easily waited an hour just to have a trade-in valued. this is part of the deal since you wouldnt land in the finance office until your trade in is valued.
Right now we are currently accounting for both markup and mandatory add-ons as a total in the same numerical value. If it's 0 markup but $2995 for N2 filled tires then the total markup is $2995.
We are finding the opposite to be true. Most of our posters are folks that have actually spent at least a little time dealing with a dealership and are reporting the numbers back to us. Our hope is that as we get more postings the false or innacurate postings will be drowned out by the accurate quality ones.
Indeed, it will flip to the opposite side of the pole. Getting the best deal under MSRP. Pre covid if you were good at searching forums and Facebook groups you might find the select dealers advertising 3-5% below invoice pricing on certain custom orders.
We plan to really give it a UI and UX scrub and upgrade as soon as we have some funding. We are operating an MVP right now gathering as many data points as possible and trying to figure out which tasks need implemented first.
Oh jeez, ya I know CarMax is bad. We dont really have a clean way of reporting teslas or scalping of resold vehicles by 3rd parties like that right now at markups.org
Greed also drives the other side of the equation... The consumers side as it pertains to getting the best deal possible! Markups.org is merely trying to use freedom of speech and press to force more transparency and competition across the dealership market segment.
Crowd sourcing the data is the only way to uncover the real pricing that happens behind the scenes 3 hours into a dealership trip to buy that new car once you finally sit down at the finance guys office. It happened to me and it's happening in crazy high numbers of interactions. The prices listed online or initially viewed then get bludgeoned by "the mandatory addon and adm" bat once you burned half a day at the dealership and finally sit down to "talk numbers". Utilizing OEM MSRP or posted pricing data I feel paints a more flawed picture!
The site isn't meant to "get one over" on dealerships. It's merely a tool riding on the back of capitalism and free speech to reward the lowest priced dealers, pull back the veil of sneaky bait and switch pricing models and attempt to force more competition across the industry.