CARMEL, Ind. — Auction and reconditioning services provider ADESA (div. KAR Auction Services Inc.) announced the launch of Recommendations, a new solution billed as the industry’s first personalized vehicle carousel for used-vehicle dealers.
Available to eligible subscribing customers on ADESA.com, the Recommendations carousel was designed to provide unique, real-time buying recommendations tailored for each individual dealer directly on their ADESA.com homepage. Executives said the new capability was developed over the past several years by DRIVIN, KAR’s data science subsidiary, and utilizes a proprietary, complex algorithm to generate recommendations based on more than 300 independent data points.
“We are thrilled to deliver this pioneering new functionality to our dealers and empower them with the information they need to make the best, fastest and most economically calculated decisions possible,” said John Hammer, president of ADESA. “By analyzing vehicles based on each dealer’s specific geography, market conditions, lot characteristics and buyer base, our recommendations save dealers time and eliminate the guesswork around what’s most likely to lead to a quick retail sale.”
The Recommendations carousel began appearing in subscriber accounts on a staggered schedule in August 2019. It will roll out to 16,000 dealers by the end of August and to 20,000 by the end of September. It appears as soon as a dealer logs into ADESA.com or clicks the Recommendations tab. Real-time data science powers DRIVIN’s proprietary algorithms, which evaluate hundreds of data points and aggregate them into distinct decision factors that ultimately determine the inventory recommended.
“No more hunches. Our recommendations are based on cutting-edge data science — bringing facts and real value to active ADESA.com customers,” said Joe Oliveri, vice president of data as a service at KAR. “And the selections are proven to be on-target. In the first 90 days of our pilot, nearly one in four dealers who clicked to explore the vehicles specially chosen for that dealership bought one of them. The program learns every time it’s utilized, so we expect that number to go up as more dealers take advantage of having the right inventory selected for them.”
