Cars.com chief executive officer and president Alex Vetter explained why the company’s decision to acquire DealerRater goes way beyond just another sales tool within its service portfolio it can provide to dealerships.

In a way, Vetter described the pending transaction first announced on Tuesday morning basically as a move to protect dealerships from losing their sales business to upstarts that are aiming to carve away vehicle turns through a wide array of new technological approaches.

“I think it’s an important time in the auto industry because there are so many new peer-play digital companies coming into our industry, pushing the new experience or the new way to buy,” Vetter told Auto Remarketing in an exclusive phone conversation.

“We believe inherently that local dealers are still people’s best bet,” he continued. “Some lack the tools and technology to amplify what great experiences they’re providing in each of their local markets. We’re excited to help dealers harness the power of word-of-mouth marketing to amplify their customer sentiment, which we know is extremely positive.

“The media tends to focus on the one or two bad examples that are bound to happen in a big category with a big-ticket item,” Vetter went on to say. “We like to help dealers develop their own media channel to help get the word out about the great customers they’re solving problems for each and every day. There’s a lot of great opportunities here for our clients.”

Part of that opportunity resides with the potential of combining what DealerRater offers — a compilation of consumer opinions about a store’s sales and service department — with what Cars.com provides — vehicle inventory listings as well as research and other information to help individuals select a model that fits best.

“As you’ve seen over the last five, six years, consumer reviews have become a really important ingredient for all forms of e-commerce, not just automotive,” Vetter said. “You look across every category, and you could easily collect and read about prior people’s experiences with products or service providers. In the automotive industry, the competition we know is always high. Reviews are increasingly becoming one of the key decision points in helping consumers decide to they go to A or do they go to B.”

Beyond just opinions, Vetter pointed out that the combination of Cars.com and DealerRater should provide stores with a gateway to shoppers during their entire online journey to a purchase.

“What we’ve seen with DealerRater is consumers are using this last stage as an important check-in,” he said. “If you look at the audience and go to Cars.com, you tend to have a six-month purchase horizon. If you go to our mobile devices, you tend to be on almost a three-month purchase horizon on average and obviously some on a much shorter term. But when you look at DealerRater, your purchase horizon is about four weeks. “

“(The acquisition) allows Cars.com to help our dealers reach potential buyers at all stages, from the research to the vehicle selection to the dealer selection. It ensures (dealers are) in front of people when they’re making important decisions,” Vetter went on to say.

Cars.com carefully arrived at this important decision, too. Vetter described the “practical” methodology the company used.

“We’re very practical with our investors and acquisitions,” he said. “We want to make sure we find businesses that are complementary strategically, financially, culturally and operationally. I think we found that in DealerRater.

“They’ve got the best products in the industry, but they lacked the sales force of any scale,” Vetter continued. “Cars.com has invested hundreds of millions of dollars building out a robust sales network. Now we have a new product and solution we can introduce to the marketplace. There’s a lot of complementary and synergistic fit between a world-class product with a world-class sales force and being able to bring it to our 20,000-plus dealer relationships, and soon to manufacturers as well.

“The deal has a lot of win-wins for both sides that I think made this deal stand out,” he went on to say.

Auto Remarketing closed it conversation with Vetter by asking about what the impact this transaction might have on Cars.com a year from now — a span that might seem like centuries in technological terms in light of how quickly advances are made. To answer the question, Vetter returned to a thought about the traditional place dealerships have in the automotive market.

“We think that dealers are still spending half of their marketing budgets on traditional media, yet most people tend to ignore those mass-marketing messages and go online to decide on what to buy and where to buy it,” Vetter said.

“A year from now, what I would like to see is dealerships’ profitability increase because they rely less on expensive, large-scale traditional advertising and rely more on tapping into their own customer base to share and socialize how great it is to do business with them so that there aren’t this new crop of digital retailers that are coming into the industry,” he continued.

“I would like to see those businesses go by the wayside and more local dealers maintain their position of strength in the local market as the place to buy, trade and service their cars,” Vetter went on to say.