A real estate agent selling residential real estate is paid a commission based upon the selling price of a home.
However, with rare exceptions to the contrary, expect an automotive salesperson to be paid a commission based upon the profit on a given vehicle sale NOT merely the selling price of the vehicle.
The profit on the sale is defined by the dealership's management, and may or may not have any relation to what a disinterested third-party would calculate to be the profit on the sale.
To be absolutely clear, no staff member at a dealership will have any interest whatsoever in discussing dealership pay plans with customers.
The intent of the Automotive Pay Plan series of pages is merely to help you the customer better appreciate how dealership staff have clear incentives to charge you as much as possible.
The intent of this series of pages is NOT to suggest that you empathize with the sales team.
Whether explicitly stated or not, the theme of this page and almost every other page on this site is that you evaluate every major purchasing decision while thinking like an airline passenger in the midst of an emergency.
Rule Number One: Save yourself first.
Neither any auto salesperson, nor the owner of any auto dealership, nor the author of any website owes you a good deal.
You owe it to yourself.
That graphic towards the upper-left of this browser window?
For those of you that have been through the car buying process enough times, its meaning may be clear.
For the rest of you, it represents a customer moving through the automotive sales process from the perspective of dealership staff.
I can try to provide some helpful tips, but whether you get butchered or not is ultimately in your hands, not mine.