Navigating Through More Than 2 Million Dealer Vehicles

Help Me Sell My Car can do a lot of things to help you earn more money when moving on from your current vehicle. Whether it’s crafting an expert, SEO-friendly classified ad or letting you post 100+ pictures of your used car, HMSMC is dedicated to making the process easier and more profitable for you. But it’s something we don’t do that’s just as vital to your success: We don’t allow auto dealers to use our platform.

This is important because some popular websites for selling cars not only allow dealerships to participate, but the sites give them an unfair competitive advantage over private folks. In the typical setup, a website will agree to list a dealership’s ad ahead of the ads from regular folks, and the dealership agrees to give the website a commission if the ad leads to a sale. It’s a nice arrangement for the dealership – and the website – but not so much for private sellers like you.

Then there’s the numbers game. Many of the common used-car websites have many many dealerships listing their vehicles, making it that much harder for someone on the site to come across your particular used-vehicle ad. In fact, the team at HMSMC researched the issue, and here’s an example of what we discovered: When searching a high-profile website for a used Ford F-150 within 75 miles of our test location, we turned up 1,654 truck ads – but only 57 were from private sellers, which works out to a bare 3.4%. A used Toyota RAV4? Fewer than 1.9% of the ads were from individual sellers. And even though Tesla itself doesn’t have any traditional dealerships at all in the United States, nearly 60% of the ads for used Model 3 sedans were from other dealers.

Obviously, a potential buyer could easily run out of patience scrolling through all those listings and then settle on a dealership-owned vehicle before even coming to your ad. 

We simply think that HMSMC is the best place to sell your car because we do everything we can to help you earn more money, and that includes giving you a fair shake when it comes to getting your ads seen by more potential buyers.