Gumtree Motors believes it can compete with Auto Trader and has signed up its 1,000th dealer to upload used car stock to its online classifieds platform.

Andrew Hooks, Gumtree director for motors, told AM the website now attracts the second highest amount of web traffic for car dealers (according to statistic from Comscore), with Auto Trader in the number one position.

The Gumtree Motors section sees two million monthly unique visitors.

Hooks said: “We’ve seen significant growth over the past six months in a hugely competitive market, which is testament to our value proposition.”

Hooks said 13,000 cars are posted on Gumtree each day, this includes dealers and private sellers.

When asked by AM how Gumtree Motors stands out in a very crowded used car classifieds market, with many companies now vying for dealers’ marketing budgets, Hooks said: “We operate at the slightly lower end of the market with our typical users looking for slightly older cars.
“We also have a very good horizontal base of users who are coming to the Gumtree website every day for items and we can target motoring towards those customers.”

Hooks thinks that because Gumtree is ‘horizontal’ and not a ‘vertical’ company just focussed on cars, it can attract more digital footfall than websites where the sole reason to browse is when they are interested in buying a car.

Gumtree is charging dealers using a subscription package at the moment, but Hooks did tell AM he was looking into working with dealer partners on different models which could include cost per enquiry or cost per car.