Cutting days in stock: what keeps a car unsold

Every car in stock has been paid for or financed, takes up a space and loses value while it waits. On top of that, the car itself changes: its model year ages, the next inspection draws closer, the tyres get older, and a successor model can shift prices across an entire range. Days in stock are therefore not a statistic but a cost that grows daily — even if it never appears on an invoice.

The dealer dashboard breaks your stock down by standing time: up to 30 days, 31 to 90, 91 to 180 and over 180 days, each with its value at the advertised price. The bands do not tell you what to do, but they show where the money sits. Stock whose value collects in the later bands needs a different way of working than stock where only the odd car lags behind.

The most important principle comes first: the earlier you look at a car, the smaller the intervention it needs. Adding a missing photo after two weeks costs nothing. After six months, discounts are usually all that is left — and bigger ones, because by then the car has aged as well.

Before you touch the price, ask where the path to a sale breaks off. A buyer sees the car in a results list, opens it, writes, comes to view and buys — or does not. Each of those stages has a different typical cause, and most of the numbers for them are already there.

The stock list in the dashboard shows standing time, views and enquiries side by side for each car. The overview adds views per car compared with the previous period, and the ratio of views to enquiries across your whole stock. Carvexia does not count viewings; you record those yourself, for instance through the status and note of each enquiry. Read the numbers like this:

The clearest sign is a car with decent views and few enquiries while similar cars in your own stock move normally. The dashboard says so itself next to the “views per enquiry” figure: lots of views without enquiries usually means the car is priced too high. A second sign is enquiries that consist of a single question — what is your best price?

Make the comparison with the same filters buyers use: same model, similar engine, year and mileage within a narrow band, same gearbox. The price rating on the vehicle page helps as a first pointer but does not replace the comparison — it sets your car against listings of the same model on Carvexia without weighting equipment, condition or mileage. Buyers see the same rating and read it just as roughly.

Watch for thresholds too. Buyers set price filters at round figures, and a car just above such a limit drops out of every search that stops there. Because Carvexia shows prices converted for visitors searching in another currency, that threshold sits at a different point in each currency — a reason not to think only in your own currency for a car that is also in demand across the border.

Photos and text are the cause when a car gets clearly fewer views than similar ones even though the price is right — in the results list, the cover photo decides whether anyone clicks. And they are the cause when enquiries keep asking for the same things: the service book, the instrument cluster, the tyres, the underbody. A buyer who uses the enquiry form to request specific photos is telling you, word for word, what the listing lacks.

A refresh is cheaper than any round of price cuts, so it comes first: a cover photo showing the car from the front three-quarter angle in good light, the detail shots people asked for, and an order in which the evidence does not come only after twenty exterior shots. In the editor you can have your photos matched automatically; the list then shows which typical items — instrument cluster, service book, keys, interior — cannot be seen in any photo. The matching is automatic and can be wrong, but it still works as a pointer to gaps.

The same goes for the text: whatever enquiries keep asking belongs in the listing or in the seller's statements, where it appears in each visitor's language. And check the data fields. A four-wheel-drive car with an empty drivetrain field is missing from every search that filters for four-wheel drive — and no text, however good, changes that.

Some cars are neither overpriced nor badly presented but simply in the wrong setting: a big diesel estate, a convertible in November, a specification that is in little demand in your own country. Here a discount mainly makes the loss bigger without changing the number of interested buyers much.

For the country, the first step is to make the car reachable for buyers from across the border. Your listing is visible in every Carvexia market, but a buyer from another country asks first about VAT and export. If you sell the car with VAT shown separately and handle export sales, you can state a net price and export terms in the listing; it then appears under the “Export possible” filter. Whether that leads to a sale depends on the car and on the price gap between markets.

Season is a tendency rather than a rule, but a reliable one: open-top cars find more takers in spring, four-wheel-drive cars in autumn. Cutting a car that arrived in the wrong season far enough to make it move anyway is often dearer than holding it a few weeks longer — run the numbers with your own holding costs.

And the buyer group decides which fields matter. Business buyers filter on reclaimable VAT, families on seats, electric-car buyers on range. If the detail is not in its field, the car misses exactly the people it suits best.

If the diagnosis lands on price, timing matters more than the amount. An early, clear adjustment usually moves a car with less discount than several small steps taken late: every week in between costs standing time, and small steps often change nothing about which searches the car appears in. A step is big enough when it takes the car below a filter threshold or visibly changes where it stands against comparable listings.

A reduction does not go unnoticed, and that is intended. The vehicle page shows the old price struck through next to the new one, and buyers can filter specifically for reduced cars. A cut therefore brings fresh attention — whereas a string of small cuts reads as an invitation to wait a little longer.

In the stock list you can select several listings and change them together in fixed percentage steps. That suits a group of cars with the same cause, such as a season coming to an end. For a car with its own cause, an individual decision is better. After a percentage change, check the amounts: the new price is rounded to whole units, not to the tidy figures you would otherwise choose.

And one limit: deleting a car and listing it again so that it looks fresh resets its views and history to zero. Buyers who watch the market recognise it anyway — and wonder why.

Days in stock come down through a habit, not a campaign. Once a week, sort the stock list by longest standing time and go through the cars that have crossed a band boundary or whose views are falling against the previous period. The dashboard itself lists the longest-standing cars as candidates for a price change or new photos.

The stock list can be downloaded as a spreadsheet, with price, views and publication date. Put two weeks' spreadsheets side by side and you see whether a measure had any effect — and after a month, which kind of intervention actually works for your stock. That is the one figure nobody outside can give you.

For that comparison to mean anything, each car on the list gets one of five decisions, and it is noted in the spreadsheet: