How to choose a dealer website provider in Nova Scotia (and the rest of Atlantic Canada)

Most dealer website providers in Canada are national companies, and most of what they publish is written for franchise stores in Ontario and Quebec. That is not a criticism; it is where most of the dealerships are. But if you run a used-car lot in Dartmouth, Moncton, Charlottetown or St. John's, the questions that matter to you are a little different: you probably do not have a marketing department, you want to know what it costs before the first call, and you need the site to work on a phone in a parking lot with one bar of signal.

I run projects and build websites at FastTurn, so I am obviously not neutral. What follows is the list I would use if I were on your side of the table, including the questions we would want you to ask us.

Start with what the site has to do

A used-car dealer website has three jobs, in this order:

1. 01Show every car you actually have, with the right price, photos and kilometres — and nothing you have sold.
2. 02Let a shopper go from "I like this car" to "the dealer has everything they need to call me" without leaving the vehicle page: questions, financing, trade-in.
3. 03Get found by people searching for your dealership and for used cars in your area.

Everything else — the design, the animations, the blog — matters less than those three. Judge every provider on them first.

The twelve questions

Inventory

1. 01Where does our inventory come from, and how often does the site update? You want an automatic sync from your existing feed or system, not manual uploads. Ask how often it runs and whether you can see when it last ran.
2. 02What happens to a car when it sells? It should disappear (or be clearly marked sold) on the next sync, everywhere. Ask what the site does with a car that drops out of the feed. Our article on sold cars still listed explains why this is where most sites fail.

Speed

3. 03Can you show us a live vehicle page from a current client, on a phone? Not a mockup. Open it on mobile data and see how long until you can scroll the photos.
4. 04How do your vehicle pages score on Core Web Vitals? Google's Core Web Vitals measure loading, responsiveness and visual stability, and Google's free PageSpeed Insights reports them for any URL. A provider who knows their numbers will tell you; one who changes the subject has told you something too.

Turning a visit into a lead

5. 05Can a shopper start financing from the vehicle page, and what kind of credit check is it? Pre-qualification can use a soft inquiry. Equifax Canada describes its Credit Pre-Qualifier this way: the inquiry for pre-qualification is soft, and is followed by a hard inquiry if the consumer chooses to go ahead. Shoppers who are worried about their score are much more willing to start when the page says so.
6. 06Is there a trade-in tool on the vehicle page, and where does the result go?
7. 07What happens after hours? A form that waits until morning, a chat, an assistant? See after-hours leads for the trade-offs.

Leads and data

8. 08Where does every lead land, and who owns it? Leads should go into one system your team uses, with the shopper's own words attached — not into one person's inbox. Ask whether you can export everything if you leave. There is a full list of questions in who owns your dealer CRM data.

Launch

9. 09What happens to our current site while you build? The right answer is that it stays up until you are ready to switch. Nothing should go dark.
10. 10How will you keep the Google rankings we already have? A new site usually changes page addresses. Google's guidance on site moves with URL changes is the checklist: map old addresses to new ones with permanent redirects. Ask the provider to show you the redirect map before launch.

Money and terms

11. 11What does it cost, all in — build, monthly, and anything per seat, per lead or per store? Get it in writing. If the price is only available "after a discovery call", ask for a range anyway.
12. 12What do we own if we leave? The domain should always be registered in your name. Ask about the content, the photos and the data too.

Things that are specific to Atlantic Canada

National templates usually get these wrong, or simply leave them out.

• —Your regulator is not OMVIC. Ontario's regulator gets mentioned a lot in dealer content, but it is Ontario's. In Nova Scotia, dealer licences come from Service Nova Scotia — Registry of Motor Vehicles, and a licence is needed by anyone who sells or trades four or more vehicles in twelve consecutive months. The other three Atlantic provinces license dealers through their own motor vehicle registries. A provider who copies Ontario disclosure text onto your site is not helping you.
• —Tax is not the same across the region. The Canada Revenue Agency notes that since April 1, 2025, the HST rate in Nova Scotia is 14%. If you sell across a provincial line, or run lots in more than one province, any price or finance tool on your site has to use the right rate for the buyer.
• —Small markets, real names. In a market the size of Halifax or Moncton, shoppers know dealers by name and by reputation. Your Google Business Profile, your reviews and your site all have to agree on your hours, your locations and your phone number.
• —Winter. It sounds trivial, but shoppers here ask about winter tires, remote starters and block heaters. A site whose vehicle pages cannot show those details clearly is answering the wrong questions.

Red flags

• —Mockups instead of live client sites.
• —A long contract with an automatic renewal, and no published price.
• —Per-seat or per-lead fees that grow with your team.
• —"We own the website" or "we own the domain."
• —No answer to "what happens to a sold car?"
• —Inventory that someone on your team has to upload or edit by hand.

What we do, so you can compare

You should hold us to the same list. Our dealer websites sync live inventory automatically from your feed, include financing with Equifax pre-qualification (a soft inquiry that does not affect the shopper's score) and a trade-in tool, and are built with technical SEO from the start. They go live in 3–4 weeks, and your old site stays up until cut-over. A website is $1,599–$2,599, one time, in USD; the website, the CRM and the AI assistant together are $4,199 plus $59 a month, with no lock-in on the monthly. Build fees are billed 50% to start and 50% on launch. All of it is on the pricing page before you talk to anyone.

You can also click the live work rather than take our word for it: our client Buy Metro Pre-Owned runs buymetropreowned.ca and a second brand, buymetro.ca, off one platform, so a price change lands on both. One dealer group, one market — not a promise about yours.

How to run the comparison

If you would like us to look at your current site first, the free lot check takes fifteen minutes. Yulia will call to walk you through it, and you keep the teardown whether or not we ever work together.