Why Choose Provide Cars?
Smart car dealers use Provide Cars’ access to the thousands of cars, trucks and buses that pass through members-only auctions in Japan every day to get the great deals that give them the edge in their local markets.
Our professional, multilingual staff and advanced online system take the risk out of exporting, letting you concentrate on growing your business.
Give our system a test drive for 14 days here.
Members of the Japan Used
Motor Vehicle Exporters
Association since 1998
(Certificate No. JMVA-151)
Bidding Strategies
The car auctions in Japan are a great place to find great deals on good quality vehicles, but as with any auction, there are strategies you can employ to help you get the most bang for your buck.
Bidding groups
What do I mean by bidding groups? Well, to put it simply, our online auctions let you “group” bids together so that you only get the number of cars you want.
What does this mean in practice? Well, say, for example, you want a 2006 Honda Stepwagon grade 4.5 with 40,000 to 60,000 KMs on the odometer. You could have us bid on one of these every day in the auctions until you were successful. Each time you would bid, wait for the result, and then decide whether you needed to try bidding again or not. So you would take one shot each day, see if you were successful and quite probably you would have to come back the next day for another shot.
But what if there are 11 cars one day that all meet your precise requirements? You don’t really want all 11 - you just want one. On the other hand, you don’t want to have us bid on one Stepwagon only to find that you did not get it, but one of the other 10 that you would have been perfectly happy with was sold to someone else for a better price.
This is how bidding groups solve this problem by widening the net you can use to trawl for good cars every day: So, you narrow down your search to the same 11 cars. But this time, instead of picking out just one to bid on from that day’s car auctions, you enter bids on all of them. To make sure we do not get more than just the single car you want, you set them as a bidding group.
What we then do is we start bidding on these Stepwagons in the order they come up in the auctions. Some might come up, and then be sold to other people for higher than your budget. But we keep trying. We then get one, and if there are still bids outstanding, we cancel them immediately so that you get the number of cars you want.
So, by using our bidding groups, you can bid on many cars every day while at the same time being assured that we will only get you the number of cars you actually need.
Using auction price history to “skim off” bargains
How do you know where to pitch your bid for a particular car? You know that Provide Cars will bid up to this amount and charge you the actual amount we win the car for you at the auction, so you know there is a chance of getting it at a better price than your bid. But how can you always get the best bargains?
First, you need to know what the market prices are in the Japanese car auctions. This is easy using the auction price history data available to you. Just click on the “start price”, and our system will show you a list of the cars that are most similar to the one you are thinking of bidding on as well as their average price.
Knowing what similar cars have sold for in the past gives you a good idea of the ballpark for setting your bid level. But how can you use this to get the best deals?
Well, this set of cars will range in price. Let’s take an imaginary example for a car called an “X”. Let’s imagine 17 similar cars have sold for between 250,000 Yen and 435,000 Yen at car auctions in the recent past, and that the average price was 367,000 Yen.
Now, you know from this first off is that there is little point setting your bid below 250,000 Yen, as no similar cars have sold for this little. But what about trying 290,000 Yen as a bid level?
Well, you can then apply that to these cars from the past. Say you have the full group of 17 cars. What about if you could have bought 3 of these with this bid of 290,000 Yen? Remember, if you set your bid at 290,000 Yen, this means you are actually instructing our auction bidding team to bid up to 290,000 Yen - but if the bidding stops below that, then that is an extra bonus for you!
Obviously, 3 out of 17 (18%) is not a great hit rate. But, what if you entered bids not only on this car, but on another 30 cars in a similar way? A hit rate of 18% of 30 bids placed would mean 5 cars bought - all from one day’s bids! So to summarize, you can use the auction price history to set your bids near the lower end of the market price range, thus skimming off the best deals. Use this technique in tandem with our bidding groups, and you have the recipe for getting good cars, at great prices, and in decent numbers.