[_8j50]

How about allowing smaller used car dealers to sell carvana inventory. Lot space is expensive but a lot of people shop online or on magazines before going in person anyways. It will be a good lure, just have the dealer make them wait until he gets the car from carvana while they checkout existing inventory. Carvana breaks even -ish and dealers make money on the financing side (they never make money on actual sale of the car only on interest anywayd).

I never looked into carvana but there are many small dealers that don't need you to have a good credit or even a job to get a car. They could use carvanna as cloud service, vehicle-as-a-service VaaS if you will lol.

I can't imagine buying a car at carvanna, I don't care much about test driving or getting pressured to buy by a used car salesman but the quality and pricing is too high and you can't bargain with carvanna but I can tell some no name used car lot salesman how I will be back and how much I need it, how I will bring people to him,etc... and get some flexibility.

I suppose it is the same people that get their cars repaired at name brand shops and at dealers that buy this way. I need a guy that only accepts cash for whatever reason and build rapport with that person so he won't mess it up to charge more. i do that because they usually "find" parts somehow (usually just salvage) and avoid expensive parts or b.s. charges because if who their customer base is.

I am used to this stuff then there are people trying to pass laws to limit cash usage! What a world.

[coredog64]

I worked in this space at the turn of the century (Cobalt Group, now part of ADP). Dealers would grant access to their (usually) ADP backends that we'd scrape for inventory and then aggregate on websites (usually their own and maybe a larger hub). Today I'd say something like FB marketplace or Craigslist does that work. Smaller dealers post their inventory to Craigslist every day (or every week) and then Craigslist is the search engine. Unfortunately, at this price point, there's not enough margin for things like delivering cars, transferring across lots, etc.