Auto dealers across the US are embracing ecommerce as disruptors like Carvana and Vroom start taking market share. People want the option to conduct more - or even all - of the car buying process online, and innovative dealers are investing aggressively in their digital retailing capabilities.
Dealers are often limiting their potential for success because they fail to offer a truly “end-to-end” ecommerce experience. At critical points in the purchasing process, these incomplete solutions force customers out of the digital, and back into the legacy, manual, paper-powered processes of the past.
As a result, instead of a comprehensive ecommerce solution that drives transactions, dealers are left with little more than an online marketing lead generation tool.
And though high-quality leads are valuable and important, only the dealers that enable their customers to conduct the entire car buying process online are positioned to maximize success in this new world of auto retail.
Digitize Every Step in the Sale
A car is a major purchase with many essential steps. Though the precise process can be different for each customer, typically, it involves:
- Reviewing the inventory & selecting a vehicle
- Getting a trade-in vehicle offer
- Selecting available F&I products and accessories
- Calculating payments & selecting a lender
- Signing documentation
- Scheduling pick-up or delivery
And as customers progress through these steps, there are typically many parties involved beyond the dealer, including inventory management providers, financial institutions, manufacturers, and OEM partners.
Virtually all of the leading auto “digital retail” solutions available today support some of these key steps; they let customers review inventory and add-on options, offer payment-estimate calculators, and capture basic customer information. But under-the-hood, these tools pass on the customer-lead information to the dealer’s staff, so they can follow-up manually. These supposed “ecommerce” and “digital retail” solutions actually do very little to digitize the transaction.
When evaluating ecommerce solutions, dealers that hope to take full advantage of the fast-growing demand for auto ecommerce should select a solution that empowers customers to actually drive the transaction digitally, including:
- Trade-In vehicle valuation & offer management: Customers want the ability to not only get a trade-in estimate online, but receive an actual offer. This requires a solution that supports image uploads and allows customers to provide vehicle details, including VIN and odometer photos, enabling dealers to provide a more accurate trade-in value remotely.
- Instant approval & finance package selection: True ecommerce solutions not only provide payment calculators and showcase potential lenders, but they also present actual financing options the customer can choose from. This requires a solution that supports hard-credit pulls and integrates with lender systems so that customers can select a financing package digitally.
- Intelligent upgrades & add-ons workflow: To enable fully digital purchase transactions, auto ecommerce solutions must support a check-out process that programmatically recommends add-ons and upgrades based upon the customer’s chosen make & model, payment & terms, and even VIN-specific offers. The solution should enable dealers to easily configure the add-ons shown and integrate with any external services they leverage, including the Provider Exchange Network, or PEN for short.
These are essential capabilities for any successful auto ecommerce solution, but it is important that they are delivered in the context of an intuitive, seamless online check-out process; one that guides customers through each step, allows them to save their deal information so they can continue at a later time, and makes it easy for dealer staff to programmatically re-target visitors with second pencil offers.
Dealers looking for a high-performance ecommerce platform - and not simply a marketing lead generation tool - should prioritize the features highlighted above if they want to take full advantage of the rapidly growing demand for exceptional online auto purchasing experiences.
