Why Lotlinx Might Be The Best Thing Ever for Car Shoppers

Anyone who has gone online in the past decade to shop for a car has possibly had their personal information sold to someone. It’s one of the few secrets still alive and well in the car business and it’s really not the dealers or manufacturers who are perpetrating the scheme. This particular “evil” is being done by third-party lead providers.

If you go to sites like AOL Autos, you get to see vehicles that are pulled from dozens of sources within a metro area. It’s a good thing because it makes it easier than bouncing from one dealership website to another searching for the right vehicle. There’s a problem, though. The car you find might not be at the dealerships that contact you if you fill out a lead form.

When you do a search and click on the link to a vehicle you’re interested in, you’ll likely be kept on the website itself. If the vehicle matches your desires and you fill out a request for more information, it goes into the database of the site you’re on. From there, the lead is sold to lead brokers. If the dealership that has the car you clicked on subscribes to one of the lead brokers, your information is sent to that dealership. If the dealership is not a subscriber, your information is often sent to a different, similar dealership that is subscribed to the service.

Either way, your information can then be sold again to others buying leads from the services, including manufacturers, credit companies, and competing dealerships. This is why you might fill out a lead form on one site and get several calls and emails from different companies.

Lotlinx is a relatively new service that cuts through this process. Rather than direct the click to a lead form on the website, it sends the click directly to the dealership’s website that has the car you expressed interest in originally. Your contact information is not sold. If the car is everything you wanted and you would like to inquire, the information you put in goes directly to the dealership that has the car and to nobody else.

“It’s so much more transparent,” said Tyson Madliger, CEO of a Lotlinx reseller. “It’s better for the car buyers as well as for car dealers.”

Okay, so “best thing ever” might be a stretch, but it’s still a huge convenience to know that when you fill out an information form, that you’re actually contacting the dealership that has the car itself. There’s no cost to shoppers – dealers themselves subscribe to the service and pay for every valid click to their website from over 100 different automotive listing sites on the internet.

We hope this really takes off. If you’re one who has ever had the annoyance of getting tons of phone calls and emails from people who didn’t even have the car you initially wanted, you can appreciate the difference that a service like Lotlinx can make.