Senior car industry figures see a future for physical sales – but customers are rapidly embracing digital ones
Successful manufacturers and dealerships will embrace both online and physical car sales in the future in order to simplify and improve the buying process for consumers, according to a panel of industry experts.
There has been a substantial rise 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 dealers. Manufacturers have also put an increased focus on online sales, with firms such as Volvo now selling its EVs only online.
But speaking during an ‘online versus bricks and mortar’ Autocar Business Live webinar, Lex Kerssemakers, Volvo’s online global sales boss, said: “Car buying has the potential to become polarised: 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 then ultimately it’s up to the consumer where they want to go to buy the car.”
Kerssemakers added that Volvo’s role as a manufacturers is to “make sure we have systems behind every entrance where a customer interacts with our brand”. He explained: “It could be online, at a dealership, at a Volvo store or at a pop-up store. The challenge is to give them one language, one message.”
Michelle Wells from Keyloop, a firm that develops digital management platforms for dealers, said that the dealers and manufacturers should focus on how they sell cars, rather than where.
“If you compare the consumer experience of buying a car with other digital retail experiences, buying a car is harder than it needs to be,” she said. “It’s exciting, it’s cool and it’s sexy to buy a new car, but the process doesn’t necessarily need to take as long or have as many frictions as it does.”
Keyloop research shows that 62% of customers are looking at a hybrid sales model, mixing online research with visits to a dealership, while 38% are now prepared to buy entirely online.
She added that a fifth were actively “looking for alternative 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 to pick a car up, but they want a different way to buy a car.”
Daksh Gupta, the boss of major dealership firm Marshall Motor Holdings, said dealerships needed to embrace online sales, particularly with the arrival of new online-only retailers. “In the future, you will see a hybrid [of online and physical sales],” he said. “It’s going to be a hybrid of the two, and the key is about making that experience seamless.
“If you go back 25 years, when the internet wasn’t around, consumers didn’t have the ability to research cars as they do today.
“The transaction of acquiring a car that hasn’t changed, even though there’s now the ability to research a lot more in terms of what a consumer is going to buy and what they’re going to pay. What has changed is the digital arena and how that influences the consumer.
“Buying a car is quite a difficult process for a consumer to navigate through, and not all because OEMs or dealers make it difficult. Part of it is regulation, such as the number of forms a consumer has to go through and so on. It’s quite a tortuous process for the consumer, so anything we can do, particularly in terms of systems, is going to be transformative for the consumer.”
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2021-07-02 15:03