A new online vehicle broker service has recently hit the Web, and the inspiration for the new company stemmed from frustration with the current car-buying process.

KosLo’s chief executive officer and founder Devin Koskan may not have a background in the auto industry — but he has, of course, purchased vehicles before, which helped spark the idea for his newest endeavor.

KosLo works to connect dealers with shoppers from across the country by receiving shopper requests and allowing participating dealers that have the vehicle the customers wants to bid for their business.

“The project came from the frustration with the buying process, the time it took, the time you had to invest in going to multiple dealerships, time spent searching online and more,” said Koskan. “I would always go to Google and search for the best site to find a deal on a vehicle, and I knew that I was only seeing what certain venders were listing on that site, and for dealerships, I was obviously only seeing what they had right there.”

He wanted to come up with a tool that could reach the entire country and give customers negotiating power that they didn’t necessarily have when visiting one site or just a few dealerships.

“If I was only buying one vehicle I had no negotiating power — of course, if I was buying hundreds of vehicles, now I could get a better price, but I knew as an individual, I was not able to get a better price,” Koskan shared. “I always felt like even if I found a car I liked, I didn’t know if it was the best deal I could have found.”

So KosLo was born in an effort to create a system that allows dealers to broaden their market reach, as well as give consumers more buying power and save them time.

Bidding for business

When dealerships sign up with KosLo, they tell the site what brand of vehicles they sell. Then, the process begins with a customer keying in exactly what vehicle they want.

Take a 2015 Chevrolet Silverado, for example. If KosLo has 100 Chevy vendors listed in their system, when they get a bid from a customer in the market for a Chevy, the system sends out bid requests to all 100 of those Chevy dealerships, giving them the specifics of what the customer is looking for. And from there, dealerships bid for the business by sending KosLo their best price on that vehicle.

The system then takes the top 20 prices that meet the customer’s criteria and negotiates freight price on those vehicles from wherever the bid came from to the customer’s doorstep. The customer is then given the top five vehicle bids based on dealer price plus shipping cost.

After the customer chooses, the dealer will receive a confirmation code indicating the buyer's acceptance of their deal, and works directly with the buyer to finalize the sale.

“There is a competition aspect, where venders are having to give the best price they can because they know they are bidding against people across the country,” Koskan said.

“It changes the game in the fact that a customer doesn’t have to go to the dealership. A lot of dealerships have gone to no-haggle pricing models, so you go there and that price you see is what you are paying,” he continued. “It turns the tides in that a customer doesn’t have to accept that local dealership price. It gives them that negotiation power, and it saves them so much time.”

Benefits for dealers

Though the tool has the potential to assist consumers in their car-shopping process, Koskan was quick to point out the benefits for dealers, as well.

First, dealers normally have to list their inventory on third-party sites online, and connecting with these systems can be costly, and of course, the dealer has to regularly maintain these listings, as well.

“With our system, vendors don’t have to do anything or pay to link with us. They just have to be willing to bid when we send them a request,” Koskan said.

Secondly, he pointed out participating dealers might be able to scale back their marketing campaigns long-term.

“They spend hundreds of thousands of dollars doing ads on TV, in print, on the radio, just trying to reach people that have all these other choices in a local market,” said Koskan. “Now, we will be bringing leads to them from across the country, not just their local market.”

Finally, through KosLo, dealers are receiving qualified leads and not paying $50 to $100 per click on their items advertised online.

“Say, a customer clicks on their item online, they pay, where our service is they give us our best price, and we give the customer the top five prices, and it’s not until the customer picks the exact one that they want that a vendor has to pay anything for the lead,” Koskan said.

Though it isn’t a guaranteed lead, “the customer has done the research, has looked through the top five cars that we have found across the country, so it’s a pretty sure deal that they will complete the sale,” Koskan explained.

Dealer response has been great so far from the 20 dealers currently on board, Koskan said. And the company is currently in the middle of a vendor campaign to attract more dealers.

“It’s just a matter of continuing our marketing campaign and actually having the conversation with vendors to explain the benefits we bring to not only their customers, but to them,” he said.

For more information and to register for KosLo, dealers can visit https://koslo.com/business-opportunities/ or https://koslo.com/partnership/.