According to a panel of industry experts, successful manufacturers and dealers will embrace online and physical car sales in the future to simplify and improve the buying process for consumers.
There has been a substantial increase in online car sales in recent years, accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic, which has led to the launch of a number of digital-only car dealerships. Manufacturers have also placed more emphasis on online sales, with companies such as Volvo now selling their electric vehicles only online.
But speaking at an Autocar Business Live webinar “online versus bricks and mortar,” Lex Kerssemakers, Volvo’s global online sales manager, said: “Car buying has the potential to become polarized: is is it the retailer or is it online? But what we’ve decided within Volvo is that we want to create the best online / offline experience possible, and ultimately it’s up to the consumer where he wants to go to buy the car.
Kerssemakers added that Volvo’s role as a manufacturer is to “ensure that we have systems behind every entrance where a customer interacts with our brand.” to the store. The challenge is to give them a language, a message.
Michelle Wells of Keyloop, a company that develops digital management platforms for dealerships, said dealers and manufacturers should focus on how they sell cars, rather than where.
“If you compare the consumer’s car buying experience with other digital retail experiences, buying a car is more difficult than it needs to be,” she said. “It’s exciting, cool and sexy to buy a new car, but the process doesn’t necessarily have to be as long or have as much friction as it does.”
The Keyloop study shows that 62% of customers are considering a hybrid sales model, mixing online research and dealership visits, while 38% are now ready to buy entirely online.
She added that a fifth were actively looking for “other ways to buy a car than what they’re used to,” explaining, “They don’t want or need to go to a dealership. They will go. to one of them to pick up a car, but they want a different way to buy a car.
Daksh Gupta, boss of large dealer firm Marshall Motor Holdings, said dealers need to embrace online sales, especially with the arrival of new exclusively online retailers. “In the future you will see a hybrid [of online and physical sales], “he said.” It will be a hybrid of the two, and the key is to make that experience seamless.
“If you go back 25 years, when the Internet didn’t exist, consumers didn’t have the ability to search for cars like they do today.
“The transaction of buying a car has not changed, although it is now possible to do a lot more research on what a consumer will buy and what he will pay. What has changed is the digital arena and its influence on the consumer.
“Buying a car is quite a difficult process for a consumer to go through, and not just because OEMs or dealers make it difficult. Part of it is regulation, like the number of forms a consumer has to fill out, etc. It’s a pretty torturous process for the consumer, so anything we can do, especially in terms of systems, is going to be transformative for the consumer.
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Source: www.autocar.co.uk
This notice was published: 2021-07-01 16:30:19