CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -

When CarGurus launched its Deal Ratings Badges program that lets dealers display vehicle price endorsements from CarGurus on their own websites, the company shared an interesting statistic about third-party market-value verification and car-shopping.

Seventy-eight percent of 2,000 in-market car shoppers surveyed by CarGurus said they would not make a used-car purchase until they view independent, third-party data on that vehicle’s price.

Hence, the service CarGurus is providing.  Through the program, dealers are able to automatically display CarGurus badges on qualifying vehicles indicating the car is “Good Deal” or a “Great Deal.”

But consumers are not just thinking about dollar figures, most likely. So, beyond price, what else do in-market shoppers want to verify through a third party?

We posed that question to Marty Blue, senior vice president of business development and dealer marketing at CarGurus.

“With our site in particular, the savvy consumer knows that we’re also factoring in reviews of dealers,” she said in a phone interview with Auto Remarketing.

 “So, we factor that into our ‘Good Deal/Great Deal’ analysis … so that they can make sure that when they are going to get this Good Deal, they’re going to get it from a reputable dealer,” she said.

That begs the question: what are some of the qualities that strongly reviewed dealers have?  

“The biggest one is communication,” Blue said. “And having a dealer get back to them quickly and being able to answer their question. And then transparency.

“I don’t mean just transparency on price on that,” she said. “If a dealer says the car is on the lot, the consumer wants to know this car is on the lot.”

Of course, transparency on price is key, as well.

And Blue pointed out that consumers are not always simply looking to find the lowest price point.

“We don’t ever recommend to dealers that they always try to have their inventory be the lowest price on our site” — unless, she clarified, the overall strategy is to be low-price, high-volume.

“Because of the pricing tool that we have in our dashboard, dealers can always figure out where they should price their inventory in order to be a Great Deal, a Good Deal, a Fair Deal; but also so that they can also see where in our rankings they’re going to show up … and we find that inventory that is Fair is just as likely to get a lot of leads as inventory that is Great or Good.”

CarGurus announced the badge program on May 19. In essence, it gives dealers a way to “provide their customers with independent validation that they are getting a good deal,” the company said in a news release.