One of our dealership's executive managers has been pushing for digital retailing for almost a year. One of the GMs in his 20 group, with a large dealer group, has had a great response to
Roadster, which is pretty slick but I think a little ahead of the curve for wide adoption for most dealership customers. I think the viability of online retailing has a lot to do with your market. Digital Retailing is a convenience product, so if your most profitable market isn't people for whom convenience is a major pain point, that feature may only be valuable to a small percentage of your customers. Also, if you aren't willing to commit to end to end transparency that can eat your back end grosses as much as your front, you probably aren't ready for true digital retailing. Ultimately, I think we will need to evolve more as culture to be ready to widely use digital retailing as anything other than a gaming of the car buying experience to avoid being sold something you don't already want.
I think most of the dealers looking most seriously at digital retailing are ones who keep hearing that Carvana is the next big disrupter in the industry. Carvana is a convenience brand, much the way Carmax is when it comes to no-haggle. However, until Carmax starts offering end-to-end deals online, I don't think digital retailing will be anything more than a set of convenience tools that help customers figure out how much the vehicle that they like is going to cost them if they were ready to buy it.
The main thing that a great digital retailing tool should do is more related the convenience of online shopping and moving the effort of online "work" directly into the dealership sales process. If someone goes through the headache of putting all their info into an online tool only to have to provide all of that info again when they come into the dealership... big fail. If doing a bunch of work online at home in your pajamas means that that the following day you can test drive your vehicle and walk out of the dealership with keys in your hand in an hour or less, you might be on to something.
However, I don't know of a digital retailing product that syncs so completely with all the different systems in a dealership that something like that could be done flawlessly. My short experience in the automotive space has taught me that dealers aren't technical people and that integrating systems are something that they blindly throw money at when it is required, so the first product that can integrate with disparate systems with a turnkey product would really interest me. Heck, I can't get salespeople to actually read all the detail on a lead before contacting them, so, until making the customer's online work flow effortlessly into the salespersons sales process, and getting the dealership is ready to bring pricing transparency to the F&I process, I don't see "digital retailing" being anything more than a slick set of calculator tools and a standard lead generator any time soon.
Talk to someone who has purchased a car on Carvana and you might be surprised to learn how little any success that Carvana has is due to pure digital retailing and how much more it depends on providing excellent phone sales. I've been told that fewer than 30% of Carvana buyers ever get beyond the step that asks for a SSN and the vast majority of the sale is done by salespeople closing the deal on the phone when the user abandons the process after already giving up the lead... something that I bet every other dealership has large opportunities for improvement on already, without ever involving an online retailing tool.
