The key to profitably selling cars on the Web

Here is a special video. You may want to be in a quiet space when you watch it, though. The message is subtle and it requires your attention, but once you realize what presenter Brian Hoecht from Ai-Dealer is getting at then you will be transformed forever. I know I was.

The premise behind this video is about how auto dealer websites consistently underwhelm visitors and what is required to change that. While preparing for the web cast we ran to record this, I found myself disagreeing with some of Brian’s position about car dealer websites.

“Not all dealer websites are inadequate,” I would argue. But Brian would kindly and firmly say, “yes they are”. “Some do a good job,” I would continue. “No they don’t,” he would say.

But now I agree with Brian. What literally just about every car dealer website lacks today is online work flow, which is a common characteristic of the big e-commerce sites out there such as Amazon.com and eBay. By online work flow, Hoecht means that there is no total online experience for visitors on a dealer site. You can’t actually shop like you can on true e-commerce sites.

Here is an example…
Today I was on Flavia.com ordering coffee. I logged in to my account, browsed the selection, placed items into my shopping cart, mistakenly moved some items from my shopping cart to my favorites list, then put them back into my shopping cart after I realized what I did. When I went to check out I didn’t like the idea of paying $9 shipping for one month supply of coffee so I added more to my cart to stretch that shipping expense out across more time. But my shipping only increased so I called to see why shipping was so expensive.

While the customer service rep on the phone was explaining that there is a per-item charge for shipping I had another call come in so I told the rep I had to go and would deal with this later. I closed my browser and took the other call. Then when I came back later in the day, everything was right where I had left it, e.g. in my shopping cart awaiting me to purchase.

Now this was a true shopping experience. Despite not buying the coffee on my first visit, the fact that I could return later and pick up where I left off was clutch. This is not something you can do on any car dealer website I know of.

So Brian is right. Dealer sites do underwhelm because you can’t do anything on them but get to the end of a cul de sac and then ask for assistance or more information. There is no true e-commerce on most auto dealer sites which typically want to “marry you on your first date.”

Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Viddler video.