For five years, Cars & Bids has pitched itself as a more value-oriented online car auction site than Bring A Trailer, but it looks like that’s about to change soon. Last week, Cars & Bids laid off its entire business development team while cutting jobs in community moderation, accounting, and human resources. This week, the site announced in an email to users that it’s raising buyer fees starting end-of-day Tuesday.
Since the site launched, Cars & Bids charged buyer fees of 4.5 percent, up to a cap of $4,500, with a $225 minimum buyer fee. As of 5:00 p.m. PT on Feb. 25, those figures jump up to a five percent buyer fee and a cap of $7,500, with a $250 minimum buyer fee. Depending on what you end up buying, you could end up paying between $25 and $3,000 more than before.
Those new figures match the minimum, percentage-based, and maximum buyer fees seen on Bring A Trailer, and while they should boost the bottom line of Cars & Bids, they take away one of the big advantages the site previously had over Bring A Trailer. Assuming identical winning bids, the amount a buyer would actually pay on Cars & Bids would be lower, so long as that bid’s placed before end-of-day Tuesday.
Increasing the buyer’s fee cap seems like something that should’ve happened a long time ago. After all, a $4,500 maximum fee at 4.5 percent caps out at a winning bid of $100,000. Considering the means of people generally shopping above that bar, a few extra grand on a six-figure car probably isn’t the end of the world. However, now that Bring A Trailer seems to have opened itself up to more examples of reasonably priced enthusiast cars, encroaching on Cars & Bids’ niche, increasing minimum and percentage-based buyer fees could lead to more mainstream bidders being platform-agnostic.
So, with Cars & Bids soon matching Bring A Trailer on fees, why choose the platform? Well, disclosure of modifications seems more transparent, the user interface is slicker, and critically, more cars seem eligible for purchase through a streamlined escrow service. Escrow can be particularly important when buying a car sight unseen as a trusted third party, in this case, KeySavvy, taking care of payment and title transfer can prevent issues from arising and even potentially unwind a deal if fraud seems to be taking place.
In addition, Cars & Bids seems to focus on more driver-spec examples of cars that may have a few imperfections but also have values to reflect that. If that’s your jam, there still may be relative savings to be had on the platform on a case-by-case basis, although cheaper buyer fees can no longer be counted on. In practical terms, buyer fees on a $5,000 car will soon be going up from $225 to $250, buyer fees on a $10,000 car will be rising from $450 to $500, buyer fees on a $20,000 car will be rising from $900 to $1,000, and buyers fees on a $30,000 car will be rising from $1,350 to $1,500. While not enormous, every dollar makes a difference, especially to the pocketbooks of average enthusiasts.
Given that the enthusiast car market is returning to earth, that Cars & Bids leans heavily on buyer fees for revenue, that the online auction site has already laid off employees, and that the business seems to be somewhat stalled on volume, squeezing up buyer fees isn’t a surprising move. Will this current mixture of cuts and fee increases be enough? That depends on the targets of current management and how consumers respond.
While internet car auction sites have caught accusations of affecting the transaction prices of enthusiast vehicles, Cars & Bids does bring some welcome balance to the space. If private equity decides it’s had enough and strips the firm for parts, the mainstream virtual car auction world would essentially boil down to a Bring A Trailer monopoly.
Top graphic image: Cars & Bids
Support our mission of championing car culture by becoming an Official Autopian Member.
-
Layoffs Hit Cars & Bids As The Enthusiast Car Market Comes Back Down To Earth
-
This Life-Sized Wooden Model Of A Bentley Continental GT Is One Seriously Weird Way To Spend $46,250
-
You Can Buy A Porsche 911 Turbo For The Price Of A New Mustang GT
-
You Can Buy A 556-Horsepower Supercharged Cadillac CTS-V For The Price Of A New Civic Si
-
This Is What $202 Gets You On Fancy Car Auction Site ‘Bring A Trailer’
Please send tips about cool car things to tips@theautopian.com. You could even win a prize!
You don’t have the reach and the name recognition – but go ahead and raise your prices to that of your biggest (Literally – about 32x bigger) competitor.
Good luck w/ that.
I’m glad Doug got his money out of the site when he did because Chernin Group massively overpaid and they’re going to clearly wash the company from their books in a few weeks for pennies on their dollar.
They need to charge a reserve fee based on the reserve and not refund that fee even if the reserve is met. They should also disclose the reserve as soon as it is met, or after the auction ends if it doesn’t meet the reserve.
Both your takes are very anti-seller and the site is never going to do those things because they can only exist if a steady stream of new cars are being submitted for auction on the site.
I hope the equity partners will be ok.
Can’t you see it’s the last act of a desperate company, and not the first act of Henry VIII.
Doug’s gotta make the payments on the Carrera GT somehow!
I want to believe these higher fees are going to pay for outfits for Noodle.
You mean Dog DeMuro?
With all his Quirks and Fleaturesâ„¢
VeryMindfulVeryDeMuro?
Wait, laying people off and raising fees in the same week? You’re supposed to wait a little bit of time between those two things so you can make it look like a phased approach. You aren’t that DOGE guy whose name I refuse to mention.
I like BaT for it’s historic data on vehicle OEM/Model/MY/Sale date. Does C&B do that?
Yeah that is nice on BaT, but honestly that’s about the only thing I find better. As a Platform BaT is obviously better because it has more reach and is that much larger with name recognition, but without the scale and reach, I think C&B has a much much much better interface. Better search, better organization of images, waaaaayyyy better organization of information and main points of the vehicle, question blocks, etc.
So, the site is now “reporting” on other internet sites like a 12-year-old girl with gossipy stuff?
DT. Not coo. It’s beneath you. Stand on your own two feet, dude. Fuck them people, lol.
what? Dude this is an automotive journalism site and C&B is a car auction site, the two are nowhere near close to competing and you’re acting like they’re taking pot shots at the lightning site or Car and Driver for clicks. This is incredibly relevant info for the people who read here.
How dare a car news site report on car related news. What’s the relevance of them both being internet sites? Is that not the universal standard for…everything?
You don’t have to click on articles you don’t want to read! I wanted to read this one, so here I am.
This isn’t covering the downfall of crypto scammers or youtube / tiktokkers.
Doug DeMuro has been around automotive blogging for a long time, and a lot of the writers here have worked with him along the way. BAT and Cars & Bids are definitely relevant to the enthusiast market, even without that connection.
The transparency about modifications and updates is imo C&B’s biggest plus. One of my biggest gripes about BaT’s approach is they paper over major repairs, engine swaps, and modifications like they’re just an oil change.
I mean, they’ve already killed BaT’s marketshare. At this point, you’re probably listing on Dougie’s site first because you’ll get more eyeballs on your post anyway.
The lessening of auction numbers and layoffs seem to say otherwise, no?
THIS is a buyers fee
Remember when Bring A Trailer actually meant you needed to bring a trailer to collect your latest prize?
Pepperidge Farms remembers…
OK Boomer 😛
Yeah, but now BAT has sort of lost the idea of what made it great.
It’s all about flipping cars on these sites now.
It really does feel like it was that long ago…
I feel like it wasn’t, but I tend to remember decades like I used to remember years.
I used to love the weird abandoned stuff and racecars that used to show up on BAT.
It earned the new name Bring a Butler years ago. Both it and C&B got caught up in catering to people who speculate on cars like they would with land. Then C&B accepted a giant bag of private equity money, and the layoffs began.
I do miss old BaT, though it was mostly a site I liked to cruise to learn about weird old european sports cars I knew nothing about and would probably never buy.
I miss the days of BaT being only user submitted craigslist listings and things like that. My morning routine in college was to get breakfast before my early class and catch up on the BaT listings from the day before. I’ll still browse it from time to time if I’m waiting somewhere and need to kill time but it just isn’t the same
YASSSSS (trailer) QUEEN!
Bring An Enclosed Trailer (BAET), because the car probably cost more than a lot of houses.
Back when being a “car nerd” meant going to TTAC for Jack Baruth, checking out barn finds on BAT and thinking “I could totally fix that” (I couldn’t) and reading that other site for car news from Spinelli.
Nostalgia…