10-31-2007, 10:34 PM
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| Junior Member | | Join Date: Nov 2006 Location: Dayton, OH
Posts: 23
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 And now here come the consolidators...
On the cover of the October 29th issue of Automotive News, AutoNation announced that it is piloting the ability to sell cars online. http://www.autonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070504/SUB/70504037&SearchID=73297945026675 Lithia announced at the end of August that it had its own shopping cart at its new used car supercenter www.L2.com The technology now exists and cars are being sold both directly: http://www.ai-dealer.com/Automotive_News_May_2007.html and indirectly (email addresses are required in order to get in to the shopping carts). Disclosure: Ai-Dealer does not provide the solution in use at Lithia or AutoNation. Those are custom creations. This is a forum not an infomercial. Ai-Dealer has its own shopping cart ecommerce product in use since Nov 2006 at dealerships around the country. Can a shopping cart be used as an important part of a car dealer's marketing message? At Ai-Dealer, we provide franchise-exclusive 30-50 mile territories to our dealers for them to market their competitive advantage. What do user's think? How's this for a review by the Editor of F&I Magazine "I thought I'd put it to the ultimate test.. what did my wife think? She's pretty crafty you know. She selected the Camry and breezed through the rest of the process... She got a kick out of how the avatar's eyes followed the mouse and how it changed facial expressions... Now my wife has purchased a vehicle before, but it sounded like this was the first time she completely grasped the itemized breakdown of the deal." Car dealerships are busy places. Internet selling from leads is HARD. Shopping carts are new, but address many of the fundamental friction points in the market today - falling traditional advertising effectiveness, consumers hiding on the Internet due to mistrust of the traditional dealership sales process, etc As Ryan pointed out, almost every other industry on the planet has fallen to shopping cart based ecommerce. In the Dotcom era, this was tried (quite spectacularly unsuccessfully) by pure ecommerce companies. In round #2, companies like Ai-Dealer are arming the dealers themselves to transfom them from brick and mortar retailers into true click and mortar retailers. Will it work??? Anecdotal evidence is there... as CapGemini reported in its July 2007 report... 1 in 5 In-Market Vehicle Consumers would buy online if the capability existed (up from 2% in 2001). One in Five In-Market Consumers Would Buy a Car Online - Media Buyer Planner Dealers using the Ai-Dealer system are selling more cars with it than without it. Communicating the capability to consumers seems to be the biggest challenge at the moment. Once they find it and use it, great things happen Daily eCommerce Success: Recent purchase from the Shopping Cart Or maybe the Internet and selling cars are fundamentally incompatible beyond consumers submitting leads and dealers following them up with phone calls and emails to set showroom appointments. It is not what I am betting on and not what the CEO of Google would advise... "…what’s surprising is that so many companies are still betting against the net, trying to solve today’s problems with yesterday’s solutions. The past few years have taught us that business models based on controlling consumers or content don’t work. Betting against the net is foolish because you’re betting against human ingenuity and creativity." Obviously I have a bias in that Ai-Dealer is my company and I believe in what we have done and what we are doing. I encourage you to engage in the discussion and experience with your own opinion... this is a forum after all.
Last edited by bhoecht; 10-31-2007 at 10:41 PM.
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