Avoid CarCostCanada
I used CarCostCanada to research a vehicle purchase about 8 years ago and found the service useful. When I tried it again this past month the experience was very poor. First, it is true what others are saying that as soon as you sign-up and save a cost report you will receive multiple emails and texts from local car dealerships that are also paying CarCostCanada for leads. The message are automated and frequent. I ended up having to mark the dealership emial domain as spam because blocking one email was not enough; they used multiples.
Even more troubling, however, is that the quality of cost information is very poor. My impression is that it is not cost information at all. The pricing I received on the CarCostCanada report showed that the dealer purchase cost was "higher" than the "selling" price. And, both prices were higher than what the dealer actually showed me after a test drive. I thought for sure there must be a mistake so I compared the report and the dealer's provided spec sheet line by line and every option was identical. The site didn't provide accurate cost information.
I did report my concerns to the company and received an email saying they would let me know when they had cost information available. Seems odd - carCOSTcanada? If you don't have costs for a car, why not just say so? Is providing the lead to the dealership more important than providing the information to customers that they have paid for?
I am concerned the business model of the site may have degenerated into email harvesting only.
Date of experience: January 28, 2024
Reply from CarCostCanada
Hello Tim and thank you for being a CarCostCanada Member since April 2009! We are sorry you feel things have gone wrong recently. As a long-time member who has paid us more than once for access to our proprietorial CarCostCanada Market Value Reports, it appears you forgot that referrals to a CarCostCanada Recommended Dealer are optional. Please contact our customer service team to update your account preferences.
CarCostCanada Recommended Dealers enter into an agreement to cooperate with CarCostCanada Members, promising the best available deals, high quality professionalism and exceptional first-in-line experience. Recommended Dealers also undergo a vetting process and receive training about sales sensitivity. Most CarCostCanada members report positive experiences with this model, so we are truly sorry you are not satisfied with it.
Our team of dealer experts is ready to advise all our 450,000+ CarCostCanada Members about managing relations with car dealers, to improve satisfaction and help with all aspects of the car buying experience.
In your review you appear to be cross referencing a few different events, making them sound like one continuous recent experience. In July 2023, you communicated with our customer service team about your account and a recent payment and you used your membership to access two deeply detailed reports about two different brand vehicles. Because we have CarCostCanada Recommended Dealers near you for those brands, you were referred to them.
Six months later, you came back and looked at one of those vehicles again, plus you looked at a third vehicle from another brand. We did not recommend a dealer for that third vehicle, however you report you visited a dealer about that vehicle and our pricing table was wrong versus what the dealer told you. Unfortunately, you never sent us what the dealer gave you, so we can’t comment on that. We do know this vehicle has not been well received by the market and most recent sales numbers show under 300 vehicles sold in Canada in 2023 (compared to 16,000 for one popular competitor).
We CAN say that we HAVE found a display discrepancy in the way we show numbers to our members. Some manufacturers charge their dealer a “hidden fee” that they are not allowed to “officially” pass on to the customer, but dealers do add the cost when calculating the price for customers. Our members deserve to understand all the costs involved. Up till now we probably over-explain this issue by adding this hidden fee to a mathematic table in our detailed reports. However, in the case of the vehicle you are looking at, due to small supply, the manufacturer has not officially released a “true cost” for the dealer, instead they pay dealers a “commission” for each one sold. Without a true cost, our system showed MSRP and then added the hidden fee, making the “total cost” higher than the MSRP. Elsewhere in the 5 reports you created for this vehicle we do explain this, but maybe you didn’t see that explanation? We will remove the fee from the math equation to avoid future confusion AND we will improve the explanation that we provide, and we truly thank you for bringing this matter to our attention.
Despite your recent disappointment with our service, we hope you now understand a path to resolve your concerns and we look forward to you using our services again in the future!
