A TikToker says his business started getting negative Google reviews on his from a dealership manager’s wife after calling them out for predatory pricing. It turns out his followers had his back.
The video is a stitch of Zach Shefska’s (@zachshefska) original TikTok warning viewers about a car dealership that put a $10,000 market adjustment on a 2023 Jeep Renegade. A market adjustment is essentially additional profit for a car dealership above the manufacturer-suggested retail price. These markups are usually done for cars in low supply but high demand.
J.D. Power reported that a dealership may mark up cars anywhere from 5% to 50% above the original sticker price.
Shefska points out that the markup on the Renegade was ridiculous, given that it’s among the slowest-selling cars on the market. The Drive confirmed this, adding that the car is “massively oversupplied at dealers” and the current stock will take about two years to sell off.
“$10k is absolutely wild for a renegade considering 99% of people still wouldn’t buy it with a -10k adjustment,” a commenter said.
Shefska is the president and CEO of CarEdge, a car-buying platform that helps users find fair deals on new and used cars.
@zachshefska #stitch with @zachshefska #greenscreen #cardealer doing #cardealership ♬ original sound – zachshefska
The platform owner says he was surprised when he started seeing one-star reviews for the site on Google. He quickly searched the person’s name and found that it was the wife of the dealership’s sales manager.
Shefska asked that his viewers not retaliate against the dealership with negative reviews and to instead leave a positive review for CarEdge “to drown out their fake ones.”
CarEdge went from having 50 reviews to a 5-star rating with more than 1,200 reviews overnight.
Shefska’s video has garnered more than 3.5 million views and over 3,300 comments as of Thursday morning.
“This why I think we do away w dealerships. Just want to buy direct,” the top comment read.
Others shared their experiences with dealership markups.
“My friends parents went to a dealership near them the car had a $50k markup had to drive 2 hours away for a $15k mark up which they bought,” a person said.
“That’s like every dealership rn, I wanted to get a Prius and they had a 10k market adjustment too,” another shared.
The Daily Dot reached out to CarEdge and the dealership via email.
