Top 3 Mistakes Dealers Make On Their Inventory Pages

Many dealers still operate under the mistaken belief that hiding pricing will drive customers to contact their sales team for pricing information, thereby generating a lead. This is simply no longer the case. The customer journey no longer operates in this manner.

Due to the flood of information available on the internet and the prevalence of AI-assisted research, customers already know what to expect in terms of pricing and are further down the sales funnel when they reach out to you.

Hiding your price when customers are this deep into the research process makes it seem like you have something to hide. Customers will simply go elsewhere; there is no shortage of options.

Importantly, clear pricing is critical to search visibility in the age of AI. Like your customers, Google and other AI chatbots view hidden pricing as a low-trust signal and will go elsewhere for information.

Photos should be high quality. Investing in a tripod and remote camera switch for your phone will do a lot of heavy lifting here. Photos should also be selected for a variety of important angles. Customers want to see the front, side, back, and corner shots, as well as drivetrain photos. Take them all.

You should also shoot a video. Keep it brief, under 20 seconds, but get a full walk-around of the machine.

Don’t spam pictures. While having a comprehensive selection of photos is good, there’s a sweet spot (around 10-12) before customer interest in more pictures starts to fall off.

We know your sales team is pressed for time and the people shopping for tractors generally know what they’re for and how they work. But details matter, and those details are in the descriptions.

A comprehensive description of the machine will do wonders. Don’t assume your customers know what it is or how it works (even if they likely do). This is about signaling trust, and customers view comprehensive descriptions as a trust signal.

It also builds visibility with search and AI bots. Your inventory pages are no longer just for customers; they’re an information resource for AI and can drastically affect your visibility on Google, ChatGPT, and more. While the ag industry isn’t as affected by the new realities of search as some others, it’s coming, and getting in the habit now will only help you down the line.

The importance of clear, actionable CTA buttons cannot be overstated. But some dealers simply take that too far, resulting in an unclear or overwhelming path for customers.

Having a “Contact,” “Request A Quote,” “Value My Trade,” “Text Us,” “Call Us,” “Financing,” “Email Us,” etc., all present at the product detail level, makes the next step unclear. Especially when some of those CTAs simply duplicate the options available in your site’s header.

The impulse to give customers every possible choice to contact you makes sense, but it can be overwhelming. Give the customer a clear next step. In all industries, across a huge variety of website platforms and ecommerce sites, we see again and again that a single, clear CTA outperforms a stack of possible CTAs.

For what it’s worth, on our platform, we see customers have a clear preference for calling first, filling out forms a (distant) second. If you must use a form, please keep in mind that every additional field added to your form reduces conversion rates by 5%.