Top 10 Wichita Car Dealers: Automotive Reputation Leaders in KS

When you think of Wichita, Kansas, aviation likely comes to mind. Known as "The Air Capital of the World," the city is a leader in the industry.

But Wichita’s automotive sector is also thriving. From dealerships to parts manufacturers, the city's automotive landscape is diverse and growing and has carved out its niche over the years.

One standout in Wichita’s automotive history is the Jones Automobile Company. In the early 20th century, the company produced thousands of cars, including the famous 1916 Jones VI.

Today, the city’s automotive scene includes local dealerships, parts suppliers, and service centers. Companies like BG Products, known for their automotive lubricants and cleaners, continue to make a global impact.

Car dealerships in Wichita showcase a strong commitment to the customer experience with high review response rates, elevated Google star ratings, and significant review volume. 

Using the Automotive Reputation Index, which ranks dealers by review volume, star rating, and review response rate, we’ve identified the Wichita dealerships with the best online reputations. 

• Eddy’s Toyota of Wichita earns the best online reputation for dealers in Wichita. The Eddy’s group dominates in the rankings, with its dealers securing the top 4 spots overall. Each of the listed Eddy’s dealers here exhibits nearly perfect review response rates and strong relative monthly and lifetime review volumes.
• Ranked at #10, Rusty Eck Ford's position is held back by a 50% response rate to customer reviews. To climb higher, the dealership should aim to respond to every review, boosting both its search rankings and customer trust. A consistent response strategy could be achieved by partnering with a reputation management service helping them stay engaged and improve their standing. 
  
  

• Eddy’s Chevrolet Cadillac secures the #1 spot out of all luxury dealers in Wichita, with a stellar overall health score of 95%. Consistently positive reviews have paid off, propelling this dealer to the top of the rankings and proving its commitment to delivering an outstanding customer experience.
• The rest of the luxury dealers in Wichita have considerably low review volume numbers and could all benefit from a more cohesive review generation strategy. To improve their online reputations, they should implement a consistent review generation strategy and take the time to respond to every review.

• Turning to the top non-luxury dealers, Eddy’s Toyota Of Wichita again finds itself at #1. This dealer sets a high bar for online reputation in Wichita with its perfect response rate and high monthly and overall review volume.
• Davis-Moore Mazda ranks #7 on the list. The dealer has the highest adjusted star rating out of the dealers listed here but is subdued in the rankings due to having the lowest relative monthly and lifetime review volumes. To improve, Davis-Moore Mazda should implement a review generation strategy and ask for reviews at every point of customer contact. This would work to boost its online reputation score and help it rise in the ranks.
• 9 out of 10 non-luxury dealers in Wichita are also featured in the overall ranking list. This signifies that these dealers stand out overall in the city, not just within their category, and are dedicated to developing and sustaining their online reputations.
   

*Note from the editor. The Automotive Reputation Index offers substantial coverage of the nation’s dealerships, but it’s still growing. If your dealership is not yet listed on the Index and you’d like to add it, submit your information and we will add it during a regularly scheduled update, roughly once per month.

Widewail's rankings are based on the Widewail Automotive Reputation Index. Explore the full dataset:

Ranking Methodology

To rank these dealerships fairly, we chose a method that considers the fact that dealerships on our list receive a wide range of monthly review volume, in part due to varying levels of opportunity. For example, luxury brands can never sell as many cars as non-luxury brands, the price point limiting a luxury dealership's market.

To compare two dealerships with very different review volumes directly wouldn’t be fair. A dealer with two 5-star reviews doesn’t necessarily deserve to be ranked higher than a dealer with 200 reviews and a 4.5-star rating. With few reviews, the former doesn’t offer enough data for us to use to understand its performance. However, we couldn’t just ignore locations with very few reviews, as that would introduce bias into our rankings.

To solve this, we used "adjusted ratings" in our calculation of dealership ranking. In essence, "adjusted rating" is a dealership's star rating that takes into account how its review volume compares to that of other dealerships in that area. We calculated adjusted ratings by using a technique called additive smoothing which we explain below.

Additive Smoothing

The approach we’ve used is a form of what’s called “additive smoothing.” This process allows for an unbiased way to rank two otherwise unequal dealerships. At its core, additive smoothing levels the playing field by artificially increasing the number of reviews each dealership has by adding the same number of reviews of each star rating to every dealership.

Customer Engagement

Additionally, we take into account the percentage of reviews that a dealership has responded to in our calculation of ranking, as Widewail strongly believes that review response is indicative of a strong reputation strategy.

Activity

The last component revolves around how much review volume a dealership receives, which can be broken down into two parts - their lifetime volume and average monthly volume. Lifetime volume can be thought of as a popularity metric. It’s an important metric and one of the first numbers that a potential customer will see when they start looking at reviews. The second, average monthly review volume, is representative of how active the dealership currently is. We can think of it as follows, lifetime volume captures a historical view of the dealership whereas average volume gives insight into the current status. The final component for the volume metrics is to scale them so there is a more meaningful comparison. To do this we use what is known as min-max scaling. First we group dealerships by their respective city and then find the dealership with the most volume and least volume. Then for each dealer in the group, we subtract the lowest volume and divide by the difference between the highest and lowest volume. The formula for this can be seen below.  

x' = x - min(x)max(x) - min(x)

The main advantages of this approach are that all the volume metrics can be mapped to a value between 0 and 1 and the relative difference between dealership volumes can still be preserved. 

Below we see an example of this where we have 9 dealerships with differing lifetime volumes, which we then scale. Notice that the relative distance between the actual volumes and the scaled versions is the same. 

Below we have an example of ten dealerships, their review volume, and the adjusted relative volume. We can calculate the relative volume by sorting the dealers by review volume and determining the percentage of dealers that have fewer reviews. Here we see that dealer D had the most reviews and so they get a score of 1.  

The Ranking Formula

(adjusted rating / 5) * 0.3 + (response rate) * 0.3 + (lifetime volume) * 0.15 + (avg monthly volume) * 0.25

Weighting Rational

We chose to weigh each feature as follows: adjusted rating accounts for 30% of the overall score, response rate also accounts for 30%, and review volume is 40%, which is further broken down into lifetime volume (15%) and average monthly volume (25%).

Weight selection is based on Widewail’s depth of expertise in the industry and we believe is a fair representation of what should be considered a standout reputation. 

We’ve broken the weighs into three categories:

Activity (40%)

We believe the amount of review activity is the most important indicator of reputation health for a business, and is a leading driver of local search rankings. We’ve broken this category into two components: lifetime volume (15%) and frequency (25%). Lifetime volume is our “popularity” metric. 

Engagement (30%)

Engaging with customers by responding to reviews is a key component of a healthy reputation.

Quality (30%)

Rating has a substantial impact on if a business shows up in local searches and if that business is entered into a prospect’s consideration set. Rating is a key identifier of business health.

Calculation Details

If a company has an adjusted rating of 4.2, responds to 10% of their reviews and has an adjusted lifetime volume of 0.90 in their city and 0.87 for their scaled average monthly review volume, then we would calculate their overall rating as follows

(4.2 / 5) * 0.3 + (0.1)*0.3 + (0.9)*0.15 + (0.87)*0.25 = 0.252 + 0.03 + 0.135 + 0.2175 = 0.6345 * 100 = 63.45

Note: Since response rate accounts for 30% of the overall ranking, if a dealer doesn’t respond to any reviews that automatically caps the max value they can receive to 70.