How To Sell Cars Online or Offline (PART 11)

How To Sell Cars Online or Offline (PART 11)

TRANSCRIPT: Now, we’re going to talk about the best online car-buying experience. Yes, everything I’m going to show you today, dealers are doing absolutely today. Now, wait. Isn’t all online buying the same? I’m going to say, “No.” Actually, I’m going to say, “Not even close.” Online buying in some form has been available on dealership websites for more than a decade. It started with those clunky shopping carts that required lots of real-time dealer involvement. You had to have a desk manager who was working the deal with the customer and there really weren’t tools. There was just a lead generation form called shopping cart or buy it now. Today, your online buying has to also be a great experience.

“Okay, Steve. This is all digital retailing, right?” Not really. We’ve been throwing around the word digital retailing for quite a while. We’ve actually had digital retailing for at least a decade as well with things like secure credit applications and our get e-price buttons. That’s digital retailing. Digital retailing is more like the hybrid experience that we’re going to talk about after the online buying experience. This is e-commerce. This is buying online. This is buying the car fully online.

Just like a great offline experience, the first rule, you got to stop focusing on the negatives of online buying. “Wait, Steve. But, wait. Steve, we had a shopping cart before and it didn’t work,” or, “We got Shop, Click and Drive right now. We didn’t sell any cars on that.”

Many of the tools have failed in the past and a lot of the tools you guys have today, these are just toys. They really are, or they assumed everyone that wanted to buy fully online so it’s an either/or and that your managers, these tools assume like the shopping cart that your managers would be standing by with nothing else to do but work these online deals. Yes.

As of this webcast date. Here’s the negative. I’ll give it to you right now. As of this webcast date, every state still requires some form of wet signature to make the deal complete but guess what? As a dealer, that’s not our concern. It’s also not a roadblock. It’s an opportunity. For example, because our state requires a wet signature, we get to do a proper delivery, whether it’s at their place or ours. If we can have the delivery at our place, we get to do a service walk and other things, don’t we? We’ll talk about that. Online car buying, by the way, we can keep focusing on the negatives but it’s here. It’s not going away.

The minor inconveniences that you might think are out there for online car buying, they’ve all been solved basically. The ones that haven’t been solved are being solved every single day and they are just minor. It’s not killing dealership grosses, either. To the contrary, it’s growing front and back-end grosses for many dealers when they offer the deal completely online. I’ll say that again. For many dealers, it’s growing front and back-end grosses when they offer the deal fully online. There is no more bleeding edge with this. It’s ready, it’s ready today. Oh, by the way, it’s going to happen with or without you.