Car buying can be tedious. It’s easier today than ever before; those of us old enough to remember buying a car before the internet can probably relate to the dread and even terror associated with going from car lot to car lot trying to find the right vehicle.

Today, we’re faced with different annoyances. I found during my last car buying adventure a couple of years ago that just because you express interest in a particular vehicle on a website doesn’t mean that you’ll be contacted by the people that actually have the vehicle. As it turned out, it’s a common play by some websites to show dealership inventory from many dealers in the area, but to sell the information we give them to other parties. Crazy, I know, but doing further research I learned that it wasn’t the dealers’ fault. Their inventory was blasted out to these other sites, but if they weren’t paying for the leads, our information was sold to someone else.
This is why I was hesitant to fill in my information when searching sites like AutoTrader and AOL Autos. I would check out a vehicle, identify the dealer, then search for them on Google to find the car on the dealer’s website. It was a hassle, but this time around I wasn’t going to fall into the same trap I did last time.

Then, something interesting happened. I was clicking on some of the vehicles and realized that I was being taken directly into the dealer’s website itself. I was on AOL Autos, and then suddenly I was on the dealer’s website. It didn’t work for all of the cars, but the ones listed at the top took me directly in. I inquired with the dealer about the car and went in to buy it. While waiting, I asked why their listings went straight to their website while others did not. They told me it was from LotLinx, a traffic generation company that connects these third party sites to the dealer’s inventory.

This is the model I want. It’s the model that consumers want. We don’t want to fill out forms on third party sites just to have our information sold to multiple other parties (and not necessarily ever reaching the dealership that has the vehicle we want). It sounds simplistic and almost common sense to think that this is the right way to do business, but it’s surprising that so many of these other websites do not do it like that. They rely on selling leads and generating ad revenue. Aren’t those two types of revenue models going away?

The more that dealers and other automotive websites adopt the LotLinx style, the easier it will be for people like me to shop for cars. When you make it easier on us, you make us happier as customers.