Fees Make Your 93% Car Look Like 102% Online

Q: Do AutoTrader, CarGurus, and Cars.com show dealer fees in the listing price?

Not the same way. In Jasen's May 2026 walkthrough, AutoTrader showed the base price in search results and only disclosed the documentation fee on the detail page. CarGurus added the dealer's fee into the displayed price with an "includes dealer fees" tag. Cars.com sometimes showed a fee tag and sometimes did not. Check your own listings on each site because the rules were still changing.

Q: How do dealer fees affect my percent of market?

Your pricing tool calculates percent of market on the vehicle price, but the shopper sees the price the listing site displays. Jasen's example was a $10,900 car with almost $1,000 in fees displayed at $12,053 on CarGurus. The dealer's tool said 93% of market. The shopper was looking at roughly 102%. If you want to be aggressive, price flat with the fee included.

Q: Can car shoppers see my price history and days on lot?

Yes. CarGurus shows how many days a car has been at the dealership and a full price history, and Cars.com shows price changes too. Jasen found a 92-day truck that had been raised from $33,900 to $35,100 and a Rogue that was dropped from $23,495 to $22,900 and raised back up. Shoppers who know how to negotiate use that information to target aged cars.

Q: When should a dealership reshoot used car photos?

Whenever the photos tell the shopper the car has been sitting. Bare winter trees in the background once leaves are out, dash shots showing a temperature the region has not seen in months, auction wax on the glass, or temporary photos with dirty seats and warning lights all date the car. Jasen's rule is to reshoot in spring with tire shine on and the sunroof, leather, or captain's chairs in the first few frames.

Your pricing tool says 93% of market. The shopper sees 102%.

Jasen Rice spends 18 minutes playing cars on AutoTrader, CarGurus, and Cars.com the way a shopper does. What he finds: three sites handling dealer fees three different ways, price histories every consumer can read, and photos that quietly date the car. Any one of them can make an aggressively priced unit look expensive.

Five things Jasen found in one afternoon of clicking.

Every site handles fees differently. On AutoTrader a $42,000 truck showed as $42,000 in search and $42,399 with the doc fee only once you opened it. On CarGurus a $37,900 truck displayed as $38,695 because the site added the dealer's $699 fee. On Cars.com Jasen could not find the fee disclosed at all on several listings.

A $1,000 fee turns a 93% car into a 102% car. A CarGurus listing showed $12,053. The breakdown was $10,900 plus almost $1,000 in fees. In vAuto or VinCue that car reads $10,900 at 93% of market. The shopper sees roughly 9% more, which puts it at 102%, and the dealer is wondering why it is not selling.

Shoppers can read your full price history. One 92-day unit was raised from $33,900 to $35,100. A Kansas City area store listed a Rogue at $23,495, dropped it to $22,900, then raised it back. Jasen says he is seeing more dealers raise, drop, and raise again to avoid taking the hit on what they paid, and consumers see every move.

Bare trees and a 30 degree dash reading date your car. Kansas City has had leaves for a month. A listing with winter trees, or a dash shot showing a temperature the region has not seen in two months, tells the shopper the car has been sitting. Sponsored listings with those photos are paying extra to advertise an aged car.

Put the goodies first and shine the tires. Sunroof, leather, captain's chairs, heated seats belong in the first few photos, not after 20 clicks on a slow site. Dull black paint, dirty seats, a low tire warning on the dash, and a rusted hitch receiver all cost you on a high-mileage unit the buyer is being asked to pay up for.

Why does the same car show three different prices online?

Because the FTC fee-display rules Jasen references are being implemented by each listing site on its own schedule and in its own way. He pulled up Ford F-150s in a random zip code on all three sites. AutoTrader displayed the dealer's base price in search results and only revealed the total with the documentation fee on the detail page. Jasen's view is that the total the consumer pays should display, but he is clear that is on AutoTrader's search results, not on the dealer.

CarGurus went the other direction. Listings carried an "includes dealer fees" tag and the displayed price already had the fee baked in. Cars.com sometimes showed a fee tag and sometimes did not. Three sites, three behaviors, and the same dealer inventory feeding all of them.

That last part matters more than it sounds. If a shopper filters for a $20,000 car and your unit is $20,000 with a $595 fee, does it still show up when the site displays $20,595? Jasen does not claim to know yet. He says CarGurus told dealers to have all fees loaded by June 1 because the site was changing how it displays and filters, so the time to check your own listings is now.

How a fee breaks your price-to-market math

Jasen had a screenshot from CarGurus of a car displayed at $12,053. Click the breakdown and the vehicle price was $10,900 with almost $1,000 in dealer fees. In the dealer's pricing tool that is a $10,900 car at 93% of market, which looks aggressive. To the consumer it is a $12,000 car, an 8 to 9% swing, so the shopper is looking at 102% of market.

Jasen has made this point before in why an aggressively priced car still is not selling: 93% of what? If competitors in your market are raising prices and dropping them again, your percentage is moving under you. Add fee display on top and your pricing tool's PTM and the shopper's PTM are two different numbers, and only one of them sells cars. That is why Jasen is a flat-pricing guy: decide where you want to be with fees included and price to that.

If you're in your pricing tool at 93% of market, but display wise you're actually 9% higher with your fees, you're at 102% of market wondering why it's not selling.

Jasen Rice, LotParty Quick Tip

Your price history is public, and so is your car's age

CarGurus shows how many days the car has been at the dealership and a full history of every change. A 92-day sponsored truck had gone from $33,900 up to $35,100. A Cars.com listing from one Kansas City area store showed a Rogue at $23,495 on April 13, lowered to $22,900, then raised back up. Jasen's read is that dealers do this because they do not want to take the hit on what they paid. Consumers see it, and a shopper who knows how to negotiate goes looking for the 90-day cars.

The photos give away the age even when the site does not: leafless trees in May, a dash reading 30 degrees when it has been 65 for two months, auction wax still on the glass, temporary photos with dirty seats and a low tire warning. That is the same problem covered in how to find hidden aging inventory, except here the shopper finds it first. Jasen's advice is blunt: right now is the best time of year to reshoot, so get the green trees in and the winter dash out.

Merchandise it like a new car

Tire shine, especially on black or dark blue paint that reads dull without it. Clean seats before the camera comes out. Black spray paint and a piece of cardboard under the bumper to touch up a rusted hitch receiver, because people photograph the hitch. Then sequence the shoot so the equipment the buyer is searching for shows up in the first three or four frames instead of after 20 clicks on a slow gallery.

His closing point ties it to the market. Things are slowing, gas is still high, rates have not dropped. If you are asking someone to pay up for a high-mileage, older car, make it look brand new online, and learn how each site is going to present it. Pair that with a weekly repricing cadence instead of the raise-drop-raise pattern and you stop handing shoppers reasons to wait.

Go play cars with your own inventory.

Search yourself like a shopper

Pull up ten of your units on AutoTrader, CarGurus, and Cars.com from a phone, not your listing tool. Write down the displayed price on each site next to the price in vAuto or VinCue. Anywhere the gap is your doc fee, recalculate your real percent of market with the fee included.

Fix the data and the fee display

Check every "unknown" cab size, interior color, and trim (XL versus STX is the classic F-150 miss) and confirm your fees are loaded correctly with each site before their display rules change. Then decide on flat pricing: pick the all-in number you want the shopper to see and price to it.

Reshoot anything that looks like winter

Filter your inventory for temporary photos, bare trees, dash shots with cold temperatures, and fewer than 15 photos. Reshoot those first with tire shine on and the sunroof, leather, or captain's chairs in the first four frames. Touch up the hitch while you are out there.

Where LotWalk fits

Everything in this video can be done with a phone and a notepad. What LotWalk does is keep it from slipping. The Scoreboard shows SRP and VDP totals by source (AutoTrader, Cars.com, CarGurus) and a "Cars with less than 15 photos" tile, and the daily walk has a "< 15 Photos" filter chip with a live count so the reshoot list builds itself. Each vehicle card carries photo count and percent to market, and a Performance Engineer checks the numbers on the coaching call, so the merchandising standard gets held to instead of hoped for.

Read the whole tip.

Show transcript (lightly edited for readability)

Playing cars on the big three

Like the title said, I'm going to visit the big three listing sites. There are others out there, and I think Carfax does a pretty good job, but the big three are typically going to be Cars.com, CarGurus, and AutoTrader. We're going to play cars. I'm going to click around with no rhyme or reason to zip codes or vehicles or types. We'll pull up cars, evaluate photos and descriptions, but also go over these fees that the FTC is requiring dealers to display. Everybody's still trying to figure out how it's going to work, and I'm going to go over some of that with you.

I've got AutoTrader, CarGurus, and Cars.com up. I don't know what zip code this is and I don't know if it matters. Let's search used Ford F-150s. Again, I'm not picking on any particular dealer or dealer set, I'm randomly picking cars. There are only 87 used here, not a ton. What's weird is truck cab size: five crew and one extended cab, only six vehicles. I don't know why that's happening. Another thing that's tricky on F-150s is the trim, because you've got XLs that are really STXs and so forth going back and forth.

Photos that date the car

Let's randomly pick this truck, 42 grand. The reason I picked it is I'm really big on tire shine and things like that. This car looks a little dull, especially on a black or dark blue. The floor mats look a little rough. You want to display the car as if it's a new car, in a way. Notice the dirty seats. These might be temporary photos, but don't take pictures with a low tire warning on the dash. Even if they're temporary, there are different angles that make it not look like such a rough car.

The other thing to look for, and it depends on your region, is dead trees in the background. Not dead, they just don't have leaves. Here in Kansas City it's been about a month since we've had leaves on the trees, so this is the time of year to redo the photos. These look like temporary photos, I say that because it looks like it's got auction wax writing on the glass.

How AutoTrader and CarGurus show fees

Now let's talk about the price, 42 grand. Over on the detail page though, it's $42,399 with an asterisk for the documentation fee. This is where it gets confusing. When you do the initial search, you see $42,000. You don't see the $42,399 until you're here. I think that's not the legal way to do that. I think it has to display the total price the consumer pays. That's not on the dealer, that would be on the AutoTrader search results.

Go into CarGurus, a different zip code, same search on F-150s. Trees in the background looking good here. You're going to see cab size: crew cab, single cab, regular cab, eight unknown. Get that fixed. Interior and exterior colors, unknowns, get that fixed if this was your inventory. And it's really hard on F-150s, a lot of these XLs are probably STXs and vice versa.

What CarGurus shows is "fees may apply," but down here it says "includes dealer fees." This one was $38,695 including dealer fees. Click on it and the dealer has a $699 fee, so they're displaying $38,695 even though the price is $37,900. AutoTrader shows the price and you have to click to see the fee. Here, they're displaying it with the fee. I'm big on flat pricing. If I want to be at 30 grand with or without fees, you're going to have to figure that out.

Price history is public

You can see this price drop of $980. Not only that, consumers can see it's been 8 days at this dealership. Show full price history and you see where the car was priced and where it is now. One thing with CarGurus, they used to pull dealers' inventory and post it with or without the dealer paying. They just blacked out the dealer data. If they're doing that, they don't know the dealer fees, so can they display this car?

Here's one, 22 days at the dealership, no price changes. Let's go through the pictures. I'm big on showing the goodies. If I've got captain's chairs, heated seats, a sunroof, I'd put those at the beginning to really display the car. This one doesn't have a lot of options. Clicking on this next one, again, big on tire shine, it just looks dirty. How many clicks do I have to go through on these photos, and look how slow the site's running, to see if it's got the roof or the leather? Get the stuff you want to display up sooner rather than later. It's a weird truck with a Lariat bench seat, but overall it's a 2012, an old truck. I would do a lot better shining that car up and shining the wheels.

One more thing to watch: some dash shots show the outside temperature. This one says 65 degrees, but if it said 30 degrees and it hasn't been 30 for two months, that displays the age of the car. Customers can look at days in market and go looking for cars that have been out there a while, because they know dealers will negotiate more on an aged car.

Look at this truck. Just by the tree background alone you can tell the car's been sitting. It's a sponsored listing, so you're paying extra to display an aged car. I would redo these photos so it doesn't look as old and worn out as it probably is. A lot of people take pictures of the hitch, and it's all rusted out. I like taking black spray paint, putting cardboard down to protect the bumper, and touching up that hitch receiver. This one is 92 days. Look at the full price history: they were at $33,900 and raised it to $35,100. What I see a lot of right now is dealers raising their pricing because they don't want to take the hit on what they paid. They raise it a little, drop it a little, raise it back up.

Cars.com and the 93% problem

Here's a Nissan Rogue at one Kansas City area store on Cars.com, $23,998. Is that with or without fees? On the price history, on April 13 it was $23,495. They lowered it to $22,900, then raised it back up. Consumers can see this, guys. I don't see anything about the fees. Sometimes on Cars.com they'll have a tag about the fees. Each website seems to be running this differently right now.

Here's a fresh arrival. Some pricing history, looks like they lowered the price. As you go through, you've got to understand how your inventory is being presented to the consumer, with or without fees, and where you end up on the pricing metrics. Be careful, because consumers can see if you're raising or lowering. Let's see the gallery. This one is shot inside. There's obviously a sunroof, but is it dominant in any of the other pictures? There it is. That's the stuff I like at the beginning. Don't make me hunt and peck as a consumer. I want to know, does it have the roof, does it have the leather.

I've done a video about this before. You say, "I'm at 93% of market, why is this car not selling?" Well, 93% of what? If people in your market are raising their prices, then lowering them, then raising them back up, you run into that. And two, is it displayed with fees? I had one I can share. This was on CarGurus, displayed at $12,053. When you click the breakdown, it was actually $10,900, but the dealer has almost a thousand dollars in fees. In your pricing tool, VinCue or vAuto, you see $10,900 and you might be at 93% of market wondering why it's not selling. Well, it's displayed to the consumer at 12 grand. A thousand dollars on an 11 grand car is about an 8 or 9% swing. So if you're in your pricing tool at 93% of market, but display wise you're actually 9% higher with your fees, you're at 102% of market wondering why it's not selling.

Get ahead of it

So that's the example: one, the consumer can see your price drops and adjustments, and if you raise the price it may turn them off the car. Two, with your fees, are you really at 20 grand or are you online at $20,595 and not as aggressive as you think? Some sites display it on the listing, some don't. The other question is, if I search for a $20,000 car and the car is $20,000 with a $595 fee, so it's online at $20,595, will it still show up? You're going to have to figure this out as the third-party sites work through it. From my understanding, CarGurus is saying by June 1 you have to have all your fees in because they're changing the way they display, show, and filter. Get on top of this. We're staying ahead of it with our dealers, making sure they're displaying properly.

Photos and descriptions too. Right now is the best time to redo your photos. Get the green trees in the background, get the dash that says 30 degrees out of there. Update your inventory and learn how these sites are going to display your vehicles and how searches are going to be done. It's going to be crucial right now while things are slowing down, gas prices are still high, and interest rates haven't dropped. If people are going to pay up for a high-mileage, older car, make that thing look brand new. Shine the tires. Display it well online, and learn how these guys are going to display your inventory. It's a little longer than I typically do, but it's fun to play cars. Go play cars with your inventory and see how the competitors are doing versus you, and always stay a step ahead. Have a great Mother's Day.

Transcript lightly edited for readability from the live stream. Watch the video above for Jasen's screen share.

Questions dealers ask about listing fees and photos.

Do AutoTrader, CarGurus, and Cars.com show dealer fees in the listing price?

Not the same way. In Jasen's May 2026 walkthrough, AutoTrader showed the base price in search results and only disclosed the documentation fee on the detail page. CarGurus added the dealer's fee into the displayed price with an "includes dealer fees" tag. Cars.com sometimes showed a fee tag and sometimes did not. Check your own listings on each site because the rules were still changing.

How do dealer fees affect my percent of market?

Your pricing tool calculates percent of market on the vehicle price, but the shopper sees the price the listing site displays. Jasen's example was a $10,900 car with almost $1,000 in fees displayed at $12,053 on CarGurus. The dealer's tool said 93% of market. The shopper was looking at roughly 102%. If you want to be aggressive, price flat with the fee included.

Can car shoppers see my price history and days on lot?

Yes. CarGurus shows how many days a car has been at the dealership and a full price history, and Cars.com shows price changes too. Jasen found a 92-day truck that had been raised from $33,900 to $35,100 and a Rogue that was dropped from $23,495 to $22,900 and raised back up. Shoppers who know how to negotiate use that information to target aged cars.

When should a dealership reshoot used car photos?

Whenever the photos tell the shopper the car has been sitting. Bare winter trees in the background once leaves are out, dash shots showing a temperature the region has not seen in months, auction wax on the glass, or temporary photos with dirty seats and warning lights all date the car. Jasen's rule is to reshoot in spring with tire shine on and the sunroof, leather, or captain's chairs in the first few frames.

Your pricing tool says 93% of market. The shopper sees 102%.

Five things Jasen found in one afternoon of clicking.

Why does the same car show three different prices online?

How a fee breaks your price-to-market math

Your price history is public, and so is your car's age

Merchandise it like a new car

Go play cars with your own inventory.

Search yourself like a shopper

Fix the data and the fee display

Reshoot anything that looks like winter

Where LotWalk fits

Read the whole tip.

Playing cars on the big three

Photos that date the car

How AutoTrader and CarGurus show fees

Price history is public

Cars.com and the 93% problem

Get ahead of it

Questions dealers ask about listing fees and photos.

More Quick Tips

Why does your competitive set say 98% of market when you're really at 102%?

Priced at 90% of market and still not selling? 90% of what?

Wholesale is up and turn is 35 days. So why is your lot losing money?

Want someone to walk your lot with you?