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Founded in 2014 by three automotive and software industry veterans, Dealer Simplified helps dealers and auto auctions sell wholesale cars better than the competition. With Auction Simplified and powerful integration tools, Dealer Simplified is the software and know how franchise dealers and independent auction’s need to achieve success in modern wholesale operations.

Our Statements of Purpose

Stage of Development

We spent our first year (2014) developing and beta testing the platform at various dealers in the and are currently on version 3 of the browser version and 3 on the smart phone app.

Expected timeline to commercialization

Auction Simplified Bid Sale, is already installed in 20 dealer groups ranging in size from Suburban Auto Collection to small mom and pop single point locations.

Auction Simplified’s white lable auction called Lane Manager launched in late 2016 and is currently running in 15 independent auto auctions across the USA

Technology and Differentiators

Software and apps have changed the landscape of the automotive wholesale industry. For the first time in history more than 30% of buyers are acquiring wholesale vehicles online. But 70% are still touching and bidding right at the car in a lane or bid sale at a dealer.
TECHNO AMISH: Our key differentiator is that we make it easy for all levels of buyers buy wholesale cars from dealers and independent auto auctions. Sure the auction business is evolving but with more than 70% not willing to bid online, dealers and Indy auction houses need to be ready for both classes of buyers and be in the correct technical position when the buyers evolve fully to online purchase (if ever)
FREE TO SELLING DEALERS: We also felt that selling dealers should not have to pay for the privilege to sell their car on our service so we made the software free to selling dealers, having the buyers pay our fees.

WORLD CLASS LANE MANGER: from vehicle check-in to invoicing, Auction Simplified’s Lane Manager is world class in it’s simplicity and speed. No delays in the lane or at the cashier station helps auctions become powerhouses in their own right and helps them compete with the Big Box auction companies.

Value proposition for franchise dealers

DRASTICALLY LOWER WHOLESALE EXPENSE: Dealers using off site auctions pay $100-$200 per car to sell at offsite auctions and in many cases lose money. With an in house Silent Bid Sale, the selling dealer pays nothing. In many cases saving 100’s of: thousands of dollars per year.  
Video explaining these expenses go to http://bit.ly/BigBoxFees

 DRASTICALLY INCREASE WHOLESALE PROFIT: Silent bid by its nature improves bidder differences by on average $554, tie that in with the $100-200 in fee savings per car, many of our dealers are seeing a profit swing in the nature of $500,000 to a million per year.

Value Proposition for Auto Auctions

Small to medium size auction houses face intense pressure from the larger big box auctions and buyers are demanding better online tools and invoicing for their purchase experience.
Auction Simplified’s Lane manager jump starts this process, speeding up everything from vehicle check in to check writing, while keeping it simple for buyers and staff.

Business model

We have successfully grown the company to profitability using a simple sale to growth ratio. We built a three-person team around this growth, BDC, Inside Sales, and Launch/training. Our mission is to duplicate each team in each emerging market and expect the formula to be the grounds for rapid growth across the US Canada and Europe

Customer Base

We currently have 5200 registered buyers on the bid sale network and are growing at 2.7% per week.
There are 15 auction house and twenty dealer groups running on our platform.

Size of market:

There are 25,000 franchise dealer locations and about 65,000 used car lots in the USA alone.

And on the auction side there are approximately 2-3 per major market and others peppered throughout the country. The AAA estimates the number at 2800 in the US

Profit Potential

Automotive Dealers: 1% of the market represents 8 million in potential monthly revenue
Indy Auctions: 25 market share in two years, or 8 million in annual revenue

Competitive Assessment, Dealer Market

Companies like TradeRev (recent Canadian acquisition by Adesa (KAR)) and ACV auctions have online only apps that allow buyers to bid in 20 minute auctions, without allowing old school or non-trusting bidders to bid.
These appraisal services also have extremely high bidder drop rate due to the nature of “If” bidding where many of the vehicles at auction will never be acquired from the seller.  Plus, these services badger the buyers for more money on their bids. The “Bump” and low purchase rate cause Bidder Fatigue.
These services have begun to evolve into the trade disposal end of the business, and are gaining traction with some seller. Both services are easy to use and dealers gravitate towards “the easy way out”. But sell rates are really low and buyer satisfaction is problematic.
Both services handle the buyer and seller payments, which is expensive to operate, this is why they need to charge sellers fees and in some cases monthly fees.
Both services do not require the title to be present when selling on their service, which creates title delays and again caucuses bidder fatigue due to excessive delays.

Competitive Assessment Independent Auto Auction Market:

Companies like Auction Edge have been in the market for many years and have represented the only major offering. While their services are relatively inexpensive they are desktop based and require equipment and subscription upgrades if you want additional services.
Our software is web and app based, no special equipment required.
It is also estimates that 10% of Indy auction have no lane software at all, which make our simplified lane manager very desirable as it requires very little start up cost.

The Founders