Buying a secondhand car-dealership won't budge on price?

colino

Businesses get charged for just about everything with their bank accounts, no surprise that a lot of traders now insist on card payments instead of the security risk and costs of handling cash.

motorguy

Weird_Nev wrote: »

I've always sold my cars to the first person to view them, and generally had a few people waiting too.

Yes, i would be hitting a 90% success rate on viewing / sales ratio.

I make sure if someone comes out there is no reason for them not to buy, ie, the car is well prepared, well presented, and ready to go.

Generally i only lose them if they have a dramatically high over evaluation on their own trade in OR they've unrealistic expectations - one woman walked away from a £500 diesel car i had for sale - long MOT and TAX - because there was a golfball size ding on the bootlid.

motorguy

Guest101 wrote: »

The bank charges the garage for paying money in? Think you were using the wrong bank.

I would have that fairly standard for business accounts. I know i get charged for anything more than £10,000 a quarter lodged in cash - which you would do in a deal or two if trading full time.

OddballJamie

Guest101 wrote: »

The bank charges the garage for paying money in? Think you were using the wrong bank.

Lots of banks do this with business accounts
Here are Lloyds charges
http://www.lloydstsbbusiness.com/ratesandcharges/accounts/standardtransactioncharges.asp

Add to that staff probably don't want to be going down the bank with 5 figures in cash.

motorguy

colino wrote: »

Businesses get charged for just about everything with their bank accounts, no surprise that a lot of traders now insist on card payments instead of the security risk and costs of handling cash.

Had i stayed at it full time, thats what i was going to look at next - a portable card machine. My fees started to get crazy and also you could take deposits with a card, rather than the "i've only got £20 on me" type scenarios.

motorguy

Guest101 wrote: »

The bank charges the garage for paying money in? Think you were using the wrong bank.

what business account do you use that allows large volume cash transactions free?

Joe_Horner

As far as I've found all banks charge on business accounts after an initial charge-free period. The only way to avoid charges is to continually swap banks evey 18 months or so, which is nowhere near as easy for a business as it is for private banking. Cash deposits for us are 75p per £100 deposited, with extra charges per demonination for exchanging coins etc.

Mobile card facilities are good, but not cheap unless you use one of the "dongle on a phone" type facility, which doesn't exactly instill confidence in your customers - "If you'd just check the amount and type your PIN into my iPhone, please...."

We have a Barclays mobile terminal, which costs around £50 a month (including transaction fees on the first £1k of card sales). The advantage of that for customers is that we're happy to accept cards for any amount rather than having a minimum sale value for them (which isn't allowed under most card Merchant agreements anyway btw)

It's probably overall a loss maker for us because we often don't take £50 in card payments in a month, but helps to reassure people that we're legit because we get to display all the Barclaycard, Visa, Mastercard etc logos that people trust. Plus it helps to swing those occasional impulse purchases where the customer would otherwise have to walk off to a cashpoint (possibly changing their mind along the way).

fivetide

Another thing to consider is if you have a trade in. What is the price to change?

I recently bought a car from a dealer, paid a bit more than private of course and a lot more than they would have taken it in for but it was a one owner car, full dealer history and the right miles on it.

There was no negociating on price (saw some higher priced some lower so we were in the middle) but I did talk them into giving me an extra £200 on my bangernomics trade in because it made it easier for me to do the deal. Especially given continous insurance etc these days.

Given I could have had to wait a while to sell the current car but, may well have had to SORN it so it would need to be trailored away and couldn't be test driven I had a price in mind and worked on that instead. Less than I would have got if I had sold it but worth the small drop for a lot less grief.

arcon5

Cash is king is often only the case for car dealers dealing in low end !!!!. Usually sub £1k cars. Reason being it eliminates the risk of chargebacks, section 75 issues etc.

motorguy

arcon5 wrote: »

Cash is king is often only the case for car dealers dealing in low end !!!!. Usually sub £1k cars. Reason being it eliminates the risk of chargebacks, section 75 issues etc.

But mainly because the tax man & vat man then dont know about it. :eek: