When faced with a multitude of options, it’s never easy to pick the right product or service to suit your needs. And the more valuable the service or product, the more important it is to pick the right business to work with. But when it comes to choosing auto shipping services to ship your car, you’re faced with an unfortunate dilemma. While your car is one of your most valuable possessions, many auto transport companies aren’t at all trustworthy. At first, this might make you feel like giving up on auto transport to drive your car where you want it instead. But don’t give up! Some simple guidelines can help you weed out the bad companies and find a company that’s reliable enough to transport your car.
How to Choose Auto Shipping
When picking an auto transport company, this short list of non-negotiables can help you weed out some of the bad options reasonably soon:
- Free quotes: there’s no reason why you should pay for a quote from an auto transport company. At best, this is a way for unreliable companies to get more income from whatever customers are still willing to work with them. At worst, this is a way to deter customers from even learning what auto shipping services will cost before shipping their cars.
- Reputable: Unfortunately working with a brand new auto shipping company can land you in hot water. Because new companies haven’t had time to establish their name, there’s no way for you to know if the new company you choose to work with treat your car the way you’d want them to. For this reason, it’s best to use auto shipping services from a company that’s been around for several years. Online reviews can give you a good indication of how long a company has been around.
- One company’s service quote per website: When shopping for auto shipping quotes, it’s best to only give as little information as possible for quotes. Also choose wisely where you enter your information, and only enter your information to get quotes from a single company. While there are websites that claim to provide you with multiple quotes from different auto shipping companies, they hardly do you any favors. Most of these websites simple collect your contact information to sell it to auto shippers who will flood your inbox with emails. Only use a website that gives multiple quotes if it doesn’t ask for any contact information.
As with anything, you want to be careful about who you offer your information to. Before getting a service quote, check the auto shipper’s business website for some basic information like a brick and mortar address, for instance. Also check that the website design looks professional and that the “Services” page on the website lists the kind of auto transport you need as a service on their website. If you specifically need enclosed auto transporting, there’s no use in requesting a quote from a company that only does open carrier shipping, after all.
Using Online Reviews to Find Auto Shipping Services
According to statistics, 68% of customers a business based solely on positive online reviews. There are, however, dishonest businesses who try to take advantage of this by cheating online reviews sites to get more positive reviews. So, to choose a good auto transport company based on the online reviews you read, knowing what to look for in the online reviews can help you make a better choice.
The first step in finding reliable online reviews is knowing where to look. For the most part, common review sites like Angie’s List and Yelp are a good bet. That’s because these sites make their income through placing ads on the screen, and not the businesses that people review on them. For this reason, these sites try to attract as many trustworthy reviewers as possible, because helps them provide a trustworthy service, in turn helping them get more traffic to advertise to on their sites.
But no matter how trustworthy an online review website might be, it’s still good to critically analyze the reviews. When reviews are real, you’re likely to see both good and bad reviews on the site, and the writing style from one review to another is usually completely different. When reviews are real, they’ll vary in length and detail. If the person writing the review is good at grammar rules, the writing in the review will usually read as a casual, conversational language style and it won’t seem overly eager to push you towards buying a product. Instead, real positive reviews will simply recommend a company based on the fact that the person who wrote the review had a positive experience.
Also feel free to have a look at an auto transport company’s social media profiles before booking to ship your car with them, as social media reviews are reasonably difficult to obtain through dishonest practices such as paying for reviews from people who’ve never used their service before.
After reading reviews and doing a background check on different companies. It’s time to ask for quotes and choose the company that can offer the best service at the most affordable price.
But as a last thing to look for, you should be careful about companies that quote significantly lower than their competitors, as these companies often add extra charges later on. In these cases, your final invoice will be much higher the price you were originally quoted, perhaps even being more expensive than some of the higher quotes you received.
And remember, if you’re shopping around for quotes from a professional auto transport company, feel free to get in touch with Suncoast Auto Transport. We offer a variety of auto shipping services and we’ll be happy to provide you with a competitive quote to ship your car.