Being a car salesperson is a tough job not only because it’s hard to sell cars, but because the overall impression for people in these jobs is very low. How low, you ask? According to a recent Gallop poll conducted in 2014, among the least trusted individuals in various professions were car salespeople and members of congress. The politicians were at the bottom of the barrel, while car salespeople were next to last.
Why such a low rating for car salespeople? The truth of the matter is that this reputation is earned, to a great degree, by dishonest or pushy sales people. This image of the crooked car salesperson is further strengthened through personal experiences from everyday car shoppers; they don’t like the way they are manipulated and pressured by car dealership sales staff.
This bad reputation doesn’t mean all car dealers are dishonest, but enough of them are to give car salesmen the status as one of the least trusted professionals in the job market. One of the reasons for this are the scams they use to trick customers into buying a car or to squeeze more profits out of the deal. If you can spot some of these, you may save yourself a lot of money and trouble. Here are two of them.
Giving a Very Low Appraisal On Your Trade In
If you don’t prepare and gather the latest information on what your car is worth as a trade in, you are a prime suspect for being cheated by a dishonest salesperson. The scam works like this; the car salesman will start with an appraisal that is ridiculously low. Your first reaction is to challenge the price and try to move it higher. In this scam, all you are doing is negotiating a higher price that will still be lower than what your car is really worth.
You may think you have scored a deal by getting an extra thousand for your car, but if it is still undervalued by $2000 at the end of the negotiations, the dealer wins in the end, while you walk away with a “better” deal for your trade in. The only way to prevent this from happening is to check online sources that will give you a good ballpark figure for the worth of your car. Kelley Blue Book, Edmunds.com, and various trade magazines are a good starting point. You can also check ads to see what your particular model is selling for.
A Super Low Price On a Car
If you’ve ever heard the saying that something is too good to be true, this is especially true for car dealership advertisements for “super deals” or any derivatives of this scam. It works like this; the car dealer places an ad in the newspaper or Internet for a popular model car that is selling for way below MSRP. To prove the deal is legitimate, they list the car’s VIN number. You show up ready to purchase and you’ll get the fateful words: “Sorry, you just missed it! Someone bought it a few hours ago. But wait, here’s another car you may be interested in!”
This is a form of the old “bait and switch” tactic.There are laws against this, but shifty dealers get around it by actually having a bargain priced car on sale. But this is just to draw customers in so they can upsell you to a more expensive car. The advertised car may have been pre-sold to someone they know, to another dealer, or even to themselves! So the car was never really available for a real sale, but used only as a ruse to get customers through the door in the hopes of nailing them for a more expensive car or a car with a higher profit margin. If you see something like this in the ad, chances are that it has already been "sold" so don't waste your time in going to see it.
Source: Business Insider
(http://www.msn.com/en-us/autos/buying/a-former-car-salesman-reveals-4-tricks-dealers-use-to-get-you-to-spend-%E2%80%94-and-how-to-outsmart-them/ar-AAdtMbd#page=1a0)