Color or Price - What's more important?

[JessicaRuth]

In our latest article on the blog Joe Webb, of DealerKnows, discusses the importance color vs price on your website - and, essentially how we treat the two.

"In Cobalt’s 2014 Inventory Shopping Experience Study, 63% of all dealers surveyed believe price to be the most important and widely-used search filter on their website. Essentially, they believe that when a customer reaches the dealership’s SRP or inventory search page, they narrow themselves down by the price feature. It turns out, our customers care first and foremost about the color of their next vehicle. Who knew?

As a matter of fact, 100% of all customers surveyed for Cobalt’s study stated that color was the key vehicle feature that consumers used first to search and filter."

What do you think? Is color more important than price?

 

[Jeff Kershner]

This doesn't surprise me much; being what dealers think and what the actual answer is.

Price is the believed answer because it's what is driven into our heads. It's what consumers most often use as an objection - online and off-line.
We even use it as our main call to action on our websites for conversion – get your best price, get our Internet price, get our Internet sale price, get your ePrice (whatever that is).

The only problem with having the ability to allow the consumer to search by color, I can dramatically decrease the search result.

A dealer can have 75 Volkswagen Jetta in stock, but only two silver. We just went from a decent amount of Jetta inventory to only two.

If you're going to have search by color available on my website, consider the ability for the search to not only return those two silver Jettas but also include other like colors/shades below it. I believe it would also be useful to have some verbiage within the search results that reads something like "looking for a particular color, we may have it in our storage facility or on the way, contact us for availability".

I've found throughout the years that many people get fixated on a particular color but often change that color, or is willing to go with another color, or has a second color choice.

I remember back in the early 2000's when I was selling Volkswagens, the silver Jetta was the hot color for that car. Anyone and everyone that wanted a Jetta, wanted the car in silver, it HAD to be silver.

I would purposely park all of our silver Jetta's at the very end of the lot. Everyone had to to walk in amongst all the other colors to get to the silver ones. I would often hear "oh it looks good in this color" or "I didn't know it came in this color" or "oh it looks better in this color than what it did on the website". I can't tell you how many times somebody came in wanting silver and left in a completely different color.

I'm in no way saying that we hinder the consumer experience on our websites, I'm merely suggesting that while giving the customer what they are looking for, consider returning some different options.

 

[JessicaRuth]

If you're going to have search by color available on my website, consider the ability for the search to not only return those two silver Jettas but also include other like colors/shades below it. I believe it would also be useful to have some verbiage within the search results that reads something like "looking for a particular color, we may have it in our storage facility or on the way, contact us for availability".

That would be the key part - don't have a color search field that can't return all shades of the color when searched. There's a lot of ways to search for "White"

 

[craigh]

Chrome VIN decoding, if I'm not mistaken, gives you great colour data:
1. The OEM colour name
2. The RGB hex of the colour
3. The "real" colour (ie: white) of the car

This data is very important and we find that it's definitely one of the top questions about vehicles.

We used a tagging system on our site where the vehicle has searchable tags and we add colour-specific ones to that list.
The same way we add "sedan", "convertible" and other words that most websites don't make searchable.