What is car dealership ecommerce?

If your dealership has a website, are you doing ecommerce?

If you buy third party leads and list your vehicles on third party sites, are you doing ecommerce?

Is an email submission with a follow up phone call or email ecommerce?

Here is a quote I came across recently:

Imagine going to Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) , finding the book you want and being asked for your phone number... and then being told to wait for a call from your local bookstore with the price of the book.

Sounds ridiculous, right? You want the price in the moment, while you're online.... But that's exactly what happens to people shopping online for a new car.

And I'll add this to the article... from what I've seen, it is the current best practice to use the dealership's initial response (with or without a price) to ask a comfortable series of questions with the objective of getting the consumer to engage in the "real" sales conversation offline and agree to an in dealership consultation.  Said another way, the strategy is to take the online expression of interest (the lead) and convert it in to an offline sales opportunity.

That "leap of faith" on the dealership's part presupposes an awful lot.  It assumes that consumers are interested in interacting that way.  

Quick, name the top reasons why car buying consumers are online...

• Research + information
• Convenience
• Avoid sales pressure
• Get a better price

Now line those up with a superficial shopping website which just keeps shouting "SEND US YOUR INFO" regardless as to whether it is disguised as a Quick Quote, Arrange Demo Drive, Contact Us, or Get a Price form.

I have yet to find a consumer who thinks that submitting leads, emails, phone calls and making a showroom visit is ecommerce. 

Actually I don't find very many dealership managers who think that it is either.

Consumers in other industries have described this as a series of "Marriage Proposals On The First Date" rather than ecommerce.

We know this is behind horrible # visitors vs. # leads generated by most dealership websites.

We know this is behind horrible engagement (disinterested, unengaged, non-responsive) and awful response rates from leads - best being from your website, worst from third parties. 

After all, how exactly are you building value in you, your product and your dealership with your online consumers?  By a send me an email form?

Would you be impressed by a few photos, maybe a video and some generic VIN decode data?  How about if it were followed by a series of "TELL ME WHO YOU ARE" calls to action?

Nordstrom's charges more than Macy's for many of the same products.  How is your dealership expecting to do so online without providing a superior shopping experience?

Obviously the idea of introducing a real ecommerce system into a car dealer's repertoire of online activities is what Ai-Dealer does - and it sells cars at good grosses, raises existing website conversion rates and consumers like it.

Yes, Ai-Dealer's shopping cart ecommerce system uses "Shop Online" to generate leads since consumers have to create an account with their contact info in order to shop.  "Online Buy" is just a natural extension of shop online.  Although the great majority of shopping cart consumers respond well to dealership follow up and do buy cars from the dealership, most still come in to the dealership to do it.

Hopefully that is no too terrible an outcome.

Having "Shop and Buy Online" also has some marketing appeal in this online era.  It is no harder than attracting and meeting your consumers where they are and I would bet that your advertising agency would like nothing better than to have a conversation with you about getting that message out.

In spite of all the depressing news stories floating around right now, there are still an awful lot of cars being sold.  If you think having a message, capability and strategy as far reaching as real ecommerce could make a difference, obviously you know where to find me.  Ai-Dealer remains the only company doing this - enabling car dealers with real shopping cart ecommerce.

In the next few months, you are going to hear about car dealers embracing "Shop and Buy Online" in the news several times.  As my good friend and customer David Thomas (Dealer, Subaru of Plano, Subaru of Dallas) says:

"It has been a long time, but the shopping cart is the next big thing in the car business."

So the correct question of this email is not whether you are doing ecommerce or not... instead it is, now that you are competing with it what are you going to do?

If you would like to make a comment or ask a question, I've created a section in the Ai-Dealer forum for just those purposes.