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GM's Shop, Click Drive Program

Nov 4, 2012
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Jessica
While it's not rolled out to all 50 states, a few have been doing this GM program of online car buying - no feet on the lot.

Check out this video and article here.

As a dealer, what do you think? Do you think you would sell a lot of cars from implementing this program?

As a consumer, would you buy (please, try to imagine) a vehicle without stepping foot, not only inside the dealership, but inside your new vehicle?

Personally, I struggle thinking about skipping the test drive.

What do you think would be the positives and negatives to this?
 
No need to step foot on the lot and deal with a salesman? Sign me up.





Disclaimer: This post in no way was intended to offend any current, previous, or future people that hold the title or sales, salesman, sales women, or sales person. These are the personal opinions of Eric and should not affect the opinions of others.
 
I went to the GM Digital Tour last week and they went over some shiny test data and very quickly went over the outline of the program. They were noting a 30% close rate on these leads. They also went on to say 70% stop after completing the estimate your payments section, 30% go on to the 5 line credit app (50% complete it) and about 10% look at the Personalize and Protect information. Over and over they were saying they didn't want to remove the salesperson, they only want to deliver better traffic to the dealership. They did not go into any detail of how many dealers in an area could sign up, if everyone was going to have to participate, how the pricing was determined, or any of the other questions people had about the program. However, later in one of the sessions, it was noted that 3% of people buy without ever setting foot in a dealership. Not a ton of info, but some insight to the rhetoric.
 
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Ten years ago I sold over 500 cars in one year on eBay Motors, of which there were maybe 7-8 "test drives". All were bought after looking at online photos, reading a great description, and talking on the phone. Do I think people will buy cars like this? What do you think...
 
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Kevin,

I was right there with you. I specialized in selling New Explorer conversion vans and used cars.

Then it all fell apart.. rather quickly too. I guessed that when eBay kept raising its listing rates to its millions of mom and pop sellers and courting larger enterprise sellers (Dell.com etc) all my ebay biz all went away. Kind of a cut open the goose to get the golden egg scenario.

Not that this applies to eCommerce, but, what's left on ebay are circling vultures calling you for "whats your reserve?" (they hated when I asked them whats their max price? ;-)
 
I didn't say that. ebay Sales plummeted & ROI went in the toilet. If forced us to be super selective on which car went on ebay. To make it worse, I was in Syracuse NY and NO ONE wants to fly/drive into Syracuse in the winter (unless they were born there ;-)

At my last group we tried eBay for at least a full year and the best view we had for it was a loss prevention process. Never really jumped off the sheet as a worth the time. We did use a negotiate online product from Dealerpeak called Widestorm and created our own marketing process called Hubler Direct - Online Negotiation Risk Free. as you can imagine getting everyone bought in was tough. On the 10-20 deals a month we did do, the total average gross was higher than the overall average with back-end being 200-300 higher (on avg).

The reason for this was simple. The total time the customer was in the dealership was cut in half so FI had a nice chunk of time to sell product. Also, since the customer was on everyone's radar the managers made sure the deal was worked properly.