Online Car Buying or Shopping:

Just to let it be known, I am not an advocate of online buying a car or truck unless I can drive it, touch it, see it first. This section is to inform you of the online scams and other things to watch out for when shopping for your car, and the huge time saving tasks that can be done online.

 First off when you get online to go shopping there dozens of sites that display dealers inventory both new and used. I feel that of the best and most accurate is Yahoo! Autos. You can choose your car, by location and radius from your zip code and see tons of cars and trucks. There are other sites out there, but in my book Yahoo! Autos is the best. I usually go right to Yahoo! Autos there are others, but you can spends endless hours going to all the different sites only to find you are looking at many of the same cars on different sites.

Ok, you have been surfing around online and found a few vehicles in your general vicinity that interest you. You pull up a vehicle history report on them, sometimes right from the site where they were listed, did a little research at Yahoo! Autos. You would like to take a look and a test drive.

Now you pick-up the phone a give them a call becuse they are in different areas and you want to make sure the vehicles are still available. A friendly voice answers the phone and you ask if this car or truck is still available, they answer YES, it is. When can you come in to take it for a test drive? You ask a couple of questions about it and they answer them to your liking and you decide to drive down and take a look.

 Now you get to the dealer and look around for the vehicle, a sales person approaches you and you ask for the person you talked to on the phone. Sorry, they just left or went to lunch. You ask about the vehicle you saw online only to find out it was sold. You say, I just called and they said it was here. I was sold just a little bit ago, let me show some similar vehicles. (sound familiar, this is very common in the car business)

 We know that if we get you out to the lot and handle the situation properly we will still have a good chance of selling you a vehicle. (sneeky, isn't it) I am not saying all dealers do this, but many still practice this deception.


Joe Slick