Displaying new car inventory on your dealer website?

[Jeff Kershner]

Sorry for the lack of postings and comments over the last week. I was in NYC for a few days attending the Mercedes-Benz Internet Marketing Dealer Advisory Committee.

It is an honor and interesting committee to be apart of. It’s made up of about 10 dealers, most of which are GM’s and/or owners with only a few actual Internet / BDC managers. We also have several people from Mercedes-Benz corporate; Justin Colon and Inigo Mazquiaran (head of Internet Marketing for Mercedes-Benz USA), several regional marketing managers, a few guys from the IT department along with Bill Hunt and Mabel Estrella from Critical Mass.

The topics of conversation gets interesting, especially when you have such a mix of younger and older thinking in the same room. It’s common to hear the old school voice their opinions about many of the subjects like; dealer search on the MBUSA website, new vehicle display on your dealer websites and SEO/SEM guidelines, just to name a few.

The best part of this committee meeting is that it gives me plenty of topics to blog about.

One topic of heated conversation was the displaying of new car inventory on your website. Many of the dealers on the committee are against showing their actual new car inventory on their website. I understand why; we can usually get whatever the consumer wants even if we do not have it in stock. However, the average consumer is looking for instant gratification and dealers risk loosing one of “our customers” to the dealer that has the car in stock.

So what is the answer? Do you display new car inventory or not?

The latest statistic according to Kelley Blue Book Marketing Research shows that consumers want to see dealers list their new vehicle inventory online. Well of course they do!! They want instant gratification AND if you are not already aware, my generation and this upcoming generation are NOT loyal to anyone!! So if you don’t have the car…we will go the dealer that does.

Is there a way around this while also serving today’s consumer?

What about "virtual inventory"?

Does a vehicle configurator fill this void?

I thought I knew the answer to this but now I'm not sure. Since I'm a smaller store and I go up against some really big dogs less then 50 minutes away, I use an inventory tool (shameless plug for Homenet IOL here) that allows me to “lock inventory”, building my own virtual inventory. I sometimes lock a car as in-stock if I know I have another vehicle like it in transit from the port. This allow me to get my inventory in front of the consumers before it hits the showroom floor, while also allowing me to have a larger selection of vehicles to display.

If you are reading this again, you will notice that I have made a few changes and deletions to the last few paragraphs. After reading it for myself several times, I can see where a few readers are coming from with their comments. I have also given some deep thought into the practice of locking particular vehicles in stock and concluded maybe some of my readers are right. I've thought long and hard about this and somehow I took 2 steps backwards and maybe became a product of that  "old school" dealer mentality; something that I'm not an advocate of. I want to thank DealerRefresh readers for their opinions and feedback but mostly for bringing me back to reality!

 

[Ryan Gerardi]

Last year when I had the good fortune of buying a Mercedes (Shouts out to Peter B), I felt completely pigeon-holed into an old school marketing scheme that stems from what you bring up here.

I won't get in to it here in a comment, but the whole experience was very revealing to the new vehicle marketing strategy of Mercedes-Benz. As a customer I felt, as you put it, ungratified. Especially when the sales rep stated that if I had the ability to search for what I wanted then he would be out of a job.

This would not be the case. Posting new vehicle inventory on the Web is important and it does not need to threaten the sales reps' job security. The search tool that MB dealers have (is it NetStar or something?) is extremely powerful and I think if the data contained in there was made available to consumers then it could change the face of buying new cars in a very positive way. Customers would be empowered and the sales process would just need to be modified in a way where the reps are still important because when it comes down to it, human beings are still important in the buying/selling process.

 

[Jeff Kershner]

Ryan, I totally see where you are coming from. BUT..if you allow this to happen from the manufacturers stance, you are catering to the larger dealers only. At that point you may as well shut down the smaller dealers and sell your cars from a WalMart like facility. There are more politics in the dealer side of this business then you can ever imagine!!

 

[Andrew Salamone]

I had never personally seen the merit in posting new car inventory--I always thought along the lines of Jeff's "any dealer can get any vehicle" comment.

In retrospect, I think Jeff brings up a great point about instant gratification. I do not, however, agree with the choice to "lock" sold inventory to prevent it from being deleted. In fact, our system also allows inventory locks, but the feature was primarily designed because often the ISM has no control over bad data in their DMS which might cause a vehicle to errantly be deleted each day.

As much as my bias should perhaps be, I am still not sure I agree with advising dealers to post new car inventory (although many of our dealers do just that).

I think my largest concern with this is that if you try to satiate the consumers desire for instant gratification, you may not be able to truly convince them "we can get anything you need". It almost seems to me that this should be an either / or approach and simply taking the stance that you can get anything anytime may work better.

I also think that by and large the manufacturer sites do a great job of helping the customer determine what they desire which simply means its important to build a relationship / atmosphere conducive to the customer feeling comfortable with your dealership.

I fear that if you are showing inventory and DONT have exactly what they want it may be more of a risk than if you simply opt to build a relationship saying you can get any vehicle. But I do waiver even as i type this. Hmm. I guess that makes this a very good topic of debate! I look forward to reading others' opinions.
--

Andrew Salamone

 

[Kevin Frye]

The buyer looks for a certain new car at the local dealership lot, does not see it, goes home and looks online, and finds it elsewhere - instant gratification! The internet has made inventory access incredibly open to today's consumer, and while each dealer might want to be the primary source of new car inventory in their region, impatient shoppers are going online to see who actually has the car they want in stock. It is just part of the reality of today's more educated (and impatient) consumer. While the politics of dealerships might not like this, I believe the dealerships that understand and adjust to best meet today's consumers' needs will lead into the future.

Kevin Frye/eCommerce Director
Wyler Automotive Family

 

[Ryan Gerardi]

Dealership size should not matter.

Every consumer is different but I prefer to have the ability to do my own searching and then contact my local dealer to deliver the car I want to buy. Some consumers prefer not to do their own searching and so their local dealer would have to handle that for them. And some consumers prefer not to associate with the dealer at all which in that case if you don't have new vehicles online then you are cutting yourself out of that consumer market.

Given these 3 scenarios, it is in the dealer's best interest to have the vehicles online. I think what is important is for the OEM to design a sales model that is in the best interest of the customer, which is to have new vehicles displayed online, but also in a way that works for the dealer. OEMs and dealers not putting all their inventory online are looking after their own interests, not the customers.

I don't know how all franchises work, but I do know that if I find a vehicle at an MB dealership within a 100 or so miles from where I live, my local MB dealer will have it transferred to his own store for the delivery. Point being, if the dealers work together to provide what the customers want then the fact that the desired vehicle is not on the lot closest to me is irrelevant. No matter how small the dealership is.

 

[Joe Pistell]

Some tough love for my bretheren...

#1). For every dealer that does not post its inventory, it moves hundreds of shoppers to one that does. The windfall goes to the dealer that embraces the risk!

#2). Lost sales cut 2 ways.
Grab a map, draw a circle that is 4 hours wide around your store(s). You've Identified your Internet Marketplace. So, lets leverage this opportunity. let's take your inventory off line & Burn the map! Not logical.

#3). The Car shopping experience takes weeks & months to complete. The internet is the ONLY medium that the consumer uses throughought the entire cycle. Why would you abandon this?

#4). Net' Shoppers reward transparency.
Transparency breeds trust.
Trust builds relationships.
Relationships are the cornerstone of all businesses.

#5). Your words speak of rewarding an "impatient" customer. What you're really speaking about is the consumers lack of loyalty. Customers not loyal? Short sighted, judgemental, What?? Can't be! Tell me it aint so!

#6). Are you better than your competitors?
Find a way to communicate it!

Keep the faith!
Joe
p.s. atta boy's to Jeff K. for his Digital Dealer Cover Story!

 

[Lao Shi]

I understand there are two different philosophies on displaying inventory. Some dealers feel it is crucial to display actual inventory, showing the customer every thing they have on the lot.

Others prefer not to show the actual inventory as they feel there is a tendency to lose customers that are looking for a specific vehicle that is not in their inventory.

Most people do not fully understand the metrics of Internet / ecommerce business. Folks, it is a numbers game. The demographics of the consumer buyer is what it is all about.

The dealer who is here to do business is not there to play games they are here to sell cars and if you do not show the client what you have they will not buy.

The dealer that is driven to have the client come in to show them something they do not want will invest the time to find out the client really did want the White Honda Accord with a moon roof and left. The main issue is the old school dealers/managers who are only concerned with “Git them in the store” and then we will roll around in the parking lot and brow beat them into a purchase.

We had one manager who advocated what Jeff states, inflate your inventory and “git them in” We had one lady last week that called and asked if we had a particular Tahoe in stock and the desk manager told her yes and to come down right away. She did and it was not in stock, she is also an attorney and married to an attorney. This has turned into a fun deal.

The fact remains that most consumers will go to the OEM website first and then is directed to the local sites; this group is as high as 90%. They will see what the dealer has in inventory when the go to the OEM site anyway.

 

[Alex Snyder (blog)]

What about the dealers who constantly have to battle with an archaic DMS company that creates "hostile" information environments with more up to date vendors? I think most dealers find themselves in these situations, and may opt to have a virtual inventory over all the mistakes these "hostile environments" create.

The immediate response is: don't use those archaic DMS companies. The retort to that is: show me something better that can handle accounting, service, F&I, and all the other back-end things the larger DMS companies do. Do you manually input every single used car into an up-to-date inventory control piece? What if you have over 2000 vehicles in stock? Do you pay an outside vendor $30 a car to get this done?

I'm getting way off on a tangent. We show our actual inventory, and I have no plans to change that. Of course, we're one of the big dogs in our market so we have more inventory than most of our competitors. However, I have certainly struggled virtual inventory debate for a long time. I think the answer depends on too many factors to make it Black or White.

 

[Jeff Kershner]

Ryan said "Dealership size should not matter."
How could this not matter? The consumers wants selection.

Lao said "We had one manager who advocated what Jeff states, inflate your inventory and “git them in”"

Believe it or not..it still seems to work for 80+ % of the population. Remember, it's rare that people buy exactly what they first initially set out to for. I have customers come in all the time on a specific car, only to purchase something TOTALLY different. I had a customer in here yesterday on a SLK (convertible roadster) and left in an ML350 SUV.

I want the opportunity to build a relation and wow the customer with our service. I figure if a customer sees one of our "virtual cars" and they are not in my market, they are going to call first. My sales people nor managers would never intentionally tell a customer that we have a car when we do not. However, we would mention that we could possibly have that car in our storage facility but it would not be available for a test drive at that moment. It's an easy objective to overcome.

I agree with Alex "I think the answer depends on too many factors to make it Black or White"