Dealers be careful siging a contact with them!
Other dealers just a heads up be very careful with signing a contract with Cargurus. Their contracts have zero tolerance for cancellations and it might cause you issues down the road. Long story short I’m shutting down my used car lot. Unfortunately, the used car market is very bad in Southern Ontario right now. I had around 8 vendors for a variety of services. Each of them had a contract with me. All the vendors, excluding Cargurus were willing to cancel the contract early either with no penalty or some sort of paid penalty (ex.1 month of service cost or a portion of the remaining contact). I initially reached out to my Cargurus account rep and explained the situation. I let him know that the dealership is basically bankrupt and I want to come to some sort of settlement to get out of the remainder of our contract. I told him straight up we have enough liquid funds to cover around half the remaining contract as a “early cancellation fee”. He said he would look into it and get back before end of day but went ghost for a week not answering any calls or texts. Eventually, I got a hold of him and he said upper management said there’s nothing they are willing to do because we are in a contract. He recommended I reach out to the Cargurus billing department. I reach out to the billing department and they echoed the same thing. Their own words were that they are seeing tons of dealers going out of business and they would rather have us default and take us to collections vs making any sort of deal for a contract buyout or early cancellation. I was shocked that out of all my vendors this was the one that was giving me this kind of trouble. It essentially cost them nothing to set me up, and I was willing to cough up most of the contract value upfront just to get out of it. In comparison, my dealer website company (Zopdealer) spent around 40 hours designing my website, fixing bugs and making modifications over the last year and they cancelled my contact no questions asked with a one-month penalty. My best guess is that because Cargurus is publicly traded they don’t want their sales numbers or subscriptions falling due to early cancellations so they would rather just write off bad debt and carry out the contract till its end date even if that means they won’t get paid. Aside from the whole cancellation ordeal, the service itself didn’t provide any real value. I ask all my leads how they found us and out of the 47 units we sold during our term with Cargurus only 5 appointments came from Cargurus and only 1 of those actually converted to a sale. Personally I saw an incomparably higher ROI on Facebook marketplace for a fraction of the cost of Cargurus. I have a few dealer friends and they are currently seeing similar results with Cargurus. One thing I know for sure is that if I re-enter the industry again down the line I will not be signing up with Cargurus ever again. If you’re a dealer looking to signup with Cargurus I would at the very least recommend refusing to sign a contract with them unless they include some sort of escape clause. They are all business over there and don’t care about your situation or about saving the relationship. Update: They replied saying that I should reach out to my account rep because the account rep is positioned to review options. I did try my account rep. They ghosted me multiple times and when we finally connected the account rep said there are no options lol