Here's a ratio that ought to shape how dealer software gets built, and mostly doesn't.
16,990 franchised light-vehicle dealerships in the US. Roughly 52,000 active independent used-car dealers. Independents outnumber franchise stores better than three to one.
Now count the vendor booths at any dealer conference aimed at the second group.
Why the market skews franchise
It isn't conspiracy, it's economics. Franchise stores are bigger, spend more, have OEM co-op money to spend it with, and cluster into groups you can sell to once and deploy to forty times. An independent with two rooftops is a harder sale for a smaller contract.
So the sector gets served by trickle-down: franchise tooling, feature-stripped, at a lower price. Which mostly doesn't fit, because the differences aren't about size.
The data is different. No OEM feed, no factory warranty record, no manufacturer-standardised service history. What an independent has is what it captured itself — which is often better on the finance side and thinner on the vehicle side. A retention engine that assumes OEM data as a starting point has nothing to work with.
The lifecycle is different. A franchise store's retention story is service-to-resell across a five-to-seven year arc. A BHPH store's relationship is a payment relationship, weekly or biweekly, where the most valuable communication is often about keeping a customer current rather than selling them anything.
The margin structure is different. Fixed ops absorption means something different when you have two bays. Reconditioning cost per unit matters more than fixed coverage.
The compliance exposure is different, and higher. Buy-here-pay-here sits closer to consumer-lending regulation than franchise retail does. A texting programme that's merely TCPA-adequate isn't necessarily adequate here.
Feature-stripping a franchise product addresses none of that. It just makes it cheaper to be the wrong shape.
What independents actually ask us for
Having sold into this segment on both sides of the border, the requests are consistent and unglamorous:
- Tell me who's about to fall out of contact — before they stop answering, not after
- Reach them where they answer, which in this segment skews heavily to SMS and voice over email
- Don't make me hire someone to run it. There is no marketing department. There is an owner and whoever's free.
- Don't sell me a seat licence for people I don't employ
That last point kills more deals in this segment than price does. Software priced per user assumes a staffing model most independents don't have.
Why we built for it deliberately
Our Powersports & Independent line exists because we stopped trying to sell down and started building across. Same retention engine, same compliance layer, different assumptions about what data exists and who's operating it.
And the white-glove model — a dedicated performance manager, with a hard cap on active clients per manager — is arguably worth more to an independent than to a franchise group. A twenty-store group has marketing staff. A four-person independent has an owner who was in the lane this morning. The performance manager isn't a premium support tier there; it's the marketing department.
The opportunity, stated plainly
The US independent segment has the same retention economics as franchise retail, weaker incumbent tooling, less vendor competition, and customers who are — if anything — easier to keep in contact with because the relationship is more frequent.
It is the least-contested part of the largest dealer market in the world.
I don't have an insight beyond that. Just a ratio that most of the industry has decided not to look at.
Figures: NIADA 2025 Used Car Industry Report and NADA 2025 Full-Year Report, compiled here.
