Cars.com Review: Buying and Selling (2023 Guide)

Brogan is a contributor to the MarketWatch Guides team covering auto insurance news and trends.

Rashawn Mitchner is a MarketWatch Guides team editor with over 10 years of experience covering personal finance, loans, insurance and warranty topics.

Whether you want to buy a car, sell your used car or research the ins and outs of the latest models, you can do it with Cars.com. The website and app offer dozens of features to help you find your next set of wheels.

In this Cars.com review, we at the MarketWatch Guides team will cover everything you need to know about how to buy or sell a car with the company. We’ve reviewed the best websites to sell a car online and rank Cars.com as our top choice.

Key Takeaways:

After comparing many options on the market, we rank Cars.com as the best resource to buy, sell or trade a car. The site lists over 2 million new cars and used vehicles from dealers across the country. And if you want to sell or trade in your car, you can get an online offer in just a few minutes or list it for sale on the Cars.com automotive marketplace.

Cars.com Pros and Cons

Cars.com is a reliable tool for buying and selling a car. You can use the website or app to view millions of vehicle listings across the country, get an instant offer for your car or list your car for sale. Cars.com has an A+ rating with accreditation from the Better Business Bureau (BBB), which shows it has good communication with customers and works to resolve complaints.

Cars.com has been around since 1998, offering a convenient way for consumers to buy and sell cars. The company advertises vehicles from nearly 20,000 car dealerships along with private sellers on its platform, with a selection of more than 2 million new and used cars to choose from. Customers contact dealers directly to test drive and buy vehicles, and Cars.com doesn’t charge any fees to customers.

With Cars.com, you can buy a car, sell your car or trade it in. The site has multiple selling options plus a huge array of shopping features. We’ll go through them all here.

You can sell your car in a couple of ways on Cars.com. You can sell your car on the Cars.com private sale marketplace or get an instant offer to sell it to a dealer.

Selling your car privately may bring you the best value because you’re selling to the next owner rather than a middleman like a dealership. You can reach car buyers in your area and across the country on Cars.com. The website can help you create a detailed vehicle listing to attract buyers. It can also help you set the right price, taking the market value of your car and its condition into consideration.

The other way to sell your car is to get an instant offer at Cars.com. You can start with your license plate number, the vehicle identification number (VIN) or your car’s make and model. You’ll provide information about the car’s condition, features and accident and owner history.

Starting with a license plate number or VIN gives Cars.com more information about your vehicle, so you can get an instant cash offer. However, if you just select your car’s make and model, you’ll get a trade-in estimate instead.

A Cars.com instant offer is good for three days, so you have to act fast. Other companies like Carvana and TrueCar provide offers that are good for seven days. If you choose to accept your offer, you’ll respond to the email you received to start the sale process. A salesperson from a local dealership will then contact you to set up an appointment and inspect your car.

Your Cars.com offer is contingent upon an inspection at the dealership, so it might change if the online form didn’t account for everything about your car’s condition (or you didn’t answer the questions accurately).

Since Cars.com works with a network of dealerships, it doesn’t provide car pickup service online. However, there’s a chance a local dealer may offer home appointments or pickup services. On the car buying side, you can filter results for dealerships that offer these services. But when you sell a car, the situation depends on which dealer wants to buy your vehicle. You can call the dealer and see if it offers home pickup, but there’s no guarantee.

After getting an instant offer, you also have the option to trade in your car to a dealership. The trade offer and cash offer values are one and the same. You’ll take your car to a dealer to have it inspected and confirm the offer amount when trading it in.

There’s another way you can trade your car with Cars.com, too. You can start by finding the vehicle you want to buy on the website. Then, when you contact the dealer, let them know you have a car to trade.

Cars.com is one of the best places to purchase a new vehicle. It has over 2 million car listings from dealers across the country, so there’s a good chance you’ll find something in your area. To get started, you can either type a specific model into the search bar or start filtering listings by make and model.

Once you find a car you like, you can reach out to the dealership by phone or email for more information. At that point, you’ll interact with the dealer to take the car for a test drive and finalize the transaction. Note that Cars.com doesn’t provide financing. You can get financing from the dealer or another lender.

Cars.com stands out because of its advanced search filters. You don’t have to know the name of your perfect car. You can filter results to cars with sunroofs and 20-inch rims or trucks with extended cabs and power liftgates.

Beyond the basics of distance, year, make, model and mileage, you can filter the search results in the following ways:

There’s one thing missing from the list above: the features filter. Cars.com really shines in the vast array of features you can select when looking for a car. Say your kids have trouble with long car trips and you just need a vehicle with back seat entertainment. You can filter for that. Or, if you really love listening to your favorite albums pumped up loud, you can filter for that too. We’ll go over all the features you can filter for below.

If you aren’t 100% sure which model to get, you can use Cars.com to research different vehicles and compare them. Cars.com’s editorial team reviews a wide range of cars in detail. Many models also have expert review videos for you to get a better sense of how a car looks and drives.

The Cars.com team ranks their favorite vehicles in the 2023 Best Of awards list that includes Best of the Year, Best Pickup Truck, Best Electric Vehicle, Best SUV, Best Luxury Car and Best Family Car.

Going to a new dealership sight unseen can be a bit intimidating. That’s why Cars.com collects consumer reviews of its partner dealerships and publishes an average rating for each one. Each dealer has a seller page that displays the rating along with all customer reviews.

Since Cars.com simply advertises dealership listings, it doesn’t offer any sort of warranty. You can reach out to the selling dealership with the contact information on any listing to verify whether the car comes with a warranty.

Compared to other options on the market, Cars.com offers good value if you want to sell your car. You’ll get either an exact offer or a price range for your vehicle, depending on what information you share about the car.

How does the instant offer value from Cars.com compare to other options? Our team received offers for a 2015 Ford F-150 Super Cab and a 2015 Toyota Camry. In both cases, the Cars.com value ranged both below and above the Kelley Blue Book (KBB) value. See the details of our offers below.

You have the ability to negotiate your price with the dealership after receiving a Cars.com offer. This isn’t the case with other car selling companies like Carvana or CarMax, which give no-haggle offers. So, if you can convince the dealer your car is worth more, you may be able to get a higher offer.

So, does Cars.com have good prices on its vehicles for sale? Actually, it depends on the selling dealership. Cars.com does provide a handy deal rating so you can see how the price compares to the market value. You can filter for good or great deals and leave out the fair ones. This setup is different from online dealers like Carvana or CarMax that own and sell their inventory.

Cars.com has an A+ rating with accreditation from the BBB. On the other hand, it has a customer review score of 1.7 out of 5.0 on the website. It also scores 2.1 out of 5.0 on Trustpilot. However, there are only 20 customer reviews on the BBB and 21 on Trustpilot.

Considering Cars.com has a market of 27 million monthly car shoppers, 41 customer reviews is a vanishingly small sample size. We’ll go over a few positive and negative reviews below.

One reviewer of Cars.com on Trustpilot said the site helped them compare cars, research dealers and purchase a vehicle confidently. Other reviewers said the dealerships they worked with provided great service and everything they expected.

Some negative Car.com reviews come from customers while others come from dealerships using its services. In particular, customers had issues with dealerships adding extra fees that weren’t disclosed online. Some also said the vehicles they inquired about were no longer available and the dealership tried to sell an equivalent but more expensive model.

Interestingly, some dealerships wrote reviews saying they had trouble removing sold vehicles from the Cars.com platform, which upset some customers.

Our team reached out to Cars.com about its customer review score and negative reviews but did not receive a response.

The Cars.com app has excellent reviews on average. It scores 4.8 out of 5.0 on the App Store and 4.7 out of 5.0 on Google Play. The app is quick and responsive. You can do anything you can with the Cars.com site, including using all the advanced search filters, viewing Carfax reports and calculating payments. And if you make a profile, you can track your favorite vehicles across devices.

Since there are so many reviews for the app, these scores may be a better representation of Cars.com’s reputation. Customers not only review how the app works but their overall experience with buying or selling a car.

Overall, Cars.com is easy to use and offers powerful tools for researching, buying and selling vehicles. You can find available vehicles in your area within minutes or get an instant offer for your car online. Since dealers are responsible for providing accurate information, we recommend calling the dealership to verify any fees as you shop around.

Other than Cars.com, our top picks for selling your car include CarMax and Carvana.

CarMax is a hybrid online/in-person dealership. You can shop from its nationwide inventory on the website and have a car shipped to your local store. Then, you’ll go to CarMax in person to finalize the deal in most cases (CarMax offers home appointments in limited markets).

CarMax is one of the best places to sell your car because it offers excellent value in our experience. Our team received cash offers from CarMax that were above the KBB trade value.

Keep reading: CarMax Review

Carvana is the place to go if you want to buy or sell a car from the comfort of your home. Carvana offers home appointments in most areas of the country, though you might pay a fee depending on how far the car has to travel.

You can do nearly every part of the car buying or selling process from your couch. You only have to get up to meet the Carvana representative and sign the paperwork. If you’re selling or trading your car, the representative will do a quick inspection at that time.

Keep reading: Carvana Review

Peddle is the best option if your car is ready for the scrap heap. You can scrap your car with Peddle and walk away with a little bit of cash. Peddle provides online offers with a quick form and sends a tow truck to pick up your car for free.

Keep reading: Peddle Review

Below are some frequently asked questions about Cars.com:

You can find professional reviews of many different vehicles from sites like Edmunds, Kelley Blue Book, Cars.com, TrueCar and CarGurus. These companies review vehicles in person and rate them on a variety of factors.

Cars.com is our top choice for buying a car. You can view over two million new and used cars from dealerships and research different models in-depth. The site has detailed filters that help you pick out your perfect ride.

Kelley Blue Book (KBB) is the gold standard when it comes to finding the value of a car. You can see private sale, trade-in and dealership pricing from the site. Edmunds, NADAguides and TrueCar are also reputable options.

Because consumers rely on us to provide objective and accurate information, we created a comprehensive rating system to formulate our rankings of the best platforms to sell your car. We collected data on several providers to grade each company in five key areas. The end result was an overall rating for each provider, with the car selling platforms that scored the most points topping the list.

Here are the factors our ratings take into account:

*Data accurate at time of publication.