2019 proved to be another successful year for TRADEPENDING. Our customers, team, and company did great things.

Continued Product Growth & Fun Stats

When we gauge the success of our Trade product, that success is all about delivering new sales opportunities to our customers. In 2019, we delivered over 1.3M trade-in leads to our customers, roughly 3,700 per day, or 154 per hour. This also represented a 35% year over year increase compared to 2018, a testament to the hard work of our sales team, and our customers to adopt and embrace Trade within their organizations.

Why does this matter? The battle for dealers to acquire valuable used car inventory continues to heat up. The dealers with strategies to acquire high-quality trade-in leads will be more profitable than their competitors in 2020.

We continue to see leads from mobile devices significantly outperforming leads from desktop. We saw 71.2% of all leads in 2019 come from mobile devices, representing an increase of 7.4% over 2018 and 31.6% annualized growth rate since 2016. Stats like these demonstrate why we push our customers to continue investing in their mobile experience and advertising strategy.

With the launch of Badges in January, we released our second data-driven product to the market, powered by over 900M real-time automotive data points. Using actual market data, Badges empowers dealers to digitally merchandise their used car inventory in creative ways, showing the unique value of the cars and trucks on their lot. Building upon this past success, the team just released Badges for new car inventory.

In addition to the successes of Trade and Badges, 2019 saw many companies utilizing our Tradepending API in new and inventive ways. We support the vast majority of digital retailing tools on the market today. The Tradepending API provides companies unprecedented access to real-time market automotive data. They use this data to drive better conversions within their own products. Our customers also use the API in chat tools, FinTech solutions, and customer marketing platforms. Today our API is integrated into approximately 10,000 URLs.

Company Successes

We’re fortunate that the market has responded so positively to both Trade and Badges. As a result, we made significant investments in our sales and operations organizations in 2019. We added two new Outside Sales Directors and grew the inside sales team to grow our overall market coverage.

Our operations department strengthened the team by adding more support specialists and improving our dealer training. Their lighting fast effort saw them handle over 27,000 support tickets across thousands of customers, with an average response time of just over 5 minutes, and an average ticket close time of 27 minutes.

Other notable achievements:

• We cemented our industry leadership with formal OEM program inclusion with General Motors, Toyota, Lexus, and Subaru.
• We placed #64 on the Inc 5000 list!
• We’re at 98% recommendation rate on DrivingSales with 97 verified ratings

What’s in store for 2020

We’re currently thinking about these big topics for 2020.

• The two most important things consumers look for when visiting a dealer’s website remain researching new and used car inventory, and researching the value of a trade-in.
• At the industry level, the big box car retailers are ramping up their acquisition of used car inventory, squeezing the supply to the detriment of local dealerships.
• Mobile usage continues to be a dominant force.
• As digital marketing matures, dealers will need new ways to highlight the unique value of their inventory.

When we pair these with our mission of “simple automotive”, we remain committed to more experimentation, testing, and unique product introductions to help retail automotive dealers and their customers buy and sell cars more efficiently and transparently.

We’ll invest in our products to ensure they perform well on mobile and continue making the buying process more transparent. The more sharing of knowledge and expertise that we’re able to facilitate, the better the conversations and outcomes that our customers will experience.