Heycar is quitting — and that tells the whole story!

Of course, everyone wants to pay less if you’re a dealer or car company, especially on marketing and portals in particular. Actually, that’s strange. In many countries, we see movements emerging where people find it ‘horrible’ that the ‘power’—if you can even call it that—lies with a number of car portals, and that the prices there, like everything else, only keep rising.

Which “power”

That’s why, from time to time, initiatives emerge at home and abroad that want to combat or limit that ‘power’. I keep writing ‘power’ in quotation marks, because what is power? And do those portals even have that much ‘power’? There are plenty of other companies within the automotive vertical that you simply can’t ignore: electricity providers, social media platforms like Facebook, TikTok, but also radio and TV stations, and of course a search engine like Google. The power of some of those players is many times more dominant than that of a portal. Still, there have been many parties that specifically want to compete with the portals and not start their own social media platform…

Viabovag

In the Netherlands, Viabovag is the best-known example. I use it myself, and I have to be honest: I get more leads from Viabovag than, for example, from Autotrack. The numbers still can’t compare with those of Marktplaats, but still: Viabovag provides a decent ROI for a dealer. The future will have to show how much money the members are still willing to invest in a portal that doesn’t generate enough profit to support itself. I know from the ten years I ran Nieuweautokopen.nl: nine years and six months were loss-making, only the last six months were profitable. And then, luckily, eBay came and bought it…

Heycar and also Spoticar

And then there’s Heycar and Spoticar. Heycar announced last week that they are quitting, even though they have shareholders such as Volkswagen AG, Daimler AG and Renault, with deep pockets. The reason they give is that they underestimated the marketing investments and overestimated the digital purchasing power and appeal. Spoticar is the only one left and, in my opinion, will soon shift its focus to a used car label for the Stellantis brands. And that’s fine.

The reason they give is that they underestimated the marketing investments and overestimated the digital purchasing power and appeal.

That basically means that the portals have their act together and remain relevant for both visitors and advertisers. That prices are rising is a fact, but these portals are all investing in marketing and product adaptations to stay relevant. A market-conform price comes with that. As car companies, we can calculate for ourselves whether it’s worth it or not. But thinking you can just easily launch your own portal turns out to be difficult time and again — even if you invest 300 million, like Heycar.

So it’s not about ‘power’, but about the market relevance of a number of portals in the market. And how they convert that relevance into a price — well, we all have our opinions about that. It could always be cheaper, but I feel the same about my electricity, my rent, my taxes, Google Ads, Facebook Ads. Everything just costs money — a lot of money. Portals too.