GM's Shop, Click Drive Program

[Chris Cachor]

Any updates on this program? Saw a couple of dealers around me linking to it but the 3rd party site (dealeronlineretailing.com) is pretty clunky. I think this has a lot of potential, though.

 

[Daniel J. Mondello]

More high-tech "forward thinkingness" from General Motors and their digital partner in crime ADP/Cobalt... ::rolls eyes:: puhhhlease

P.S. my store has enrolled but I think this idea will go over about as well as a wet fart in church. This is not the same environment as Ebay, not by a mile. Nor is it Craigslist. Or any other eCommerce platform. New Cars are not necessarily unique products (with few exceptions).

If this program was specifically tailored to the used car market I'd embrace it with arms wide open.

 

[Chris Cachor]

More high-tech "forward thinkingness" from General Motors and their digital partner in crime ADP/Cobalt... ::rolls eyes:: puhhhlease

I like it being offered but the software is C+ at best. To me it's a good idea but poorly executed. Hopefully that's not deliberate.

If this program was specifically tailored to the used car market I'd embrace it with arms wide open.

Why would you embrace it if it was tailored to used vs. new?

 

[Todd Caputo]

Sign, click and drive is a FAIL...another attempt by the manufacturer to do the job dealer websites are supposed to do. I looked at it for about 5 minutes and gave it a thumbs down. Also you HAVE to have a Cobalt site in order to be on the program. We do not have a Cobalt site...A good dealer website should do all the things Shop, Click and Drive attempts to do already.

 

[Daniel J. Mondello]

I like it being offered but the software is C+ at best. To me it's a good idea but poorly executed. Hopefully that's not deliberate.



Why would you embrace it if it was tailored to used vs. new?

I think it is a better fit for used vehicles because they are unique. New Cars are all virtually the same.
A new Red 2014 Sentra SE is the same at my dealership as every other.

But the 2002 Millennium Yellow Special Edition Z06 Corvette with custom exhaust and only 22,000 on the clock on my lot is absolutely UnIqUE and very desirable to the right buyer.

This kind of program creates a similar atmosphere that ebay has on my local site. Still a pile of SH*T but Used Cars is a much more reasonable application for this kind of tech. Just my two cents..

 

[Chris Cachor]

Sign, click and drive is a FAIL...another attempt by the manufacturer to do the job dealer websites are supposed to do. I looked at it for about 5 minutes and gave it a thumbs down. Also you HAVE to have a Cobalt site in order to be on the program. We do not have a Cobalt site...A good dealer website should do all the things Shop, Click and Drive attempts to do already.

Agreed. If you can do it over the phone, you could do it online as well. I remember seeing a 3rd party vendor providing this functionality I'll try to research them some more.

 

[Jeff Kershner]

With some time under our belts with this program, what are your GM dealers seeing?

And is this still exclusive to the Cobalt or GM certified websites?

 

[joe.pistell]

Uncle Joe Rule #88:
"Car Shopper's don't use the Internet to buy a car, they use it to prepare them for the dealer visit."

 

[BHavican]

With some time under our belts with this program, what are your GM dealers seeing?

And is this still exclusive to the Cobalt or GM certified websites?

We've had this as a part of our Cobalt site(it is still exclusive to Cobalt) for about a year and don't see very good results. I like the idea of it but as Joe alluded to, most people seem to use it as a way to gather information or prepare to buy a car. Below are some stats from last month which is pretty typical of what I see:



Prospects have the ability to submit a credit app to help expedite the process as well as pick a date and time for delivery of their vehicle. As you can see, only 2 of the 9 leads we received did this.

What is interesting about the info above is the 3 people that came in but did not buy because of a price objection. GM continues sings the praises of SCD's closing ratios and when training dealers they say that psychologically when prospects complete the SCD process they are agreeing to do so at the advertised price. As you can see from the results above, that's not necessarily the case with our store.

As for the amount of leads, we've pretty much done everything we can on the website that was suggested to raise the engagement rate. GM would like us to use SCD in our other advertising but we have a non-Cobalt Chevy site that we advertise.

Perhaps geography has something to do with it, we are in the competitive Chicago area market. However, for 5 straight years Chevrolet has let this market in sales. So if lots of people are buying Chevy's than wouldn't dealers see success with SCD? By the way, we were a top 250 dealer last month with over 100 sales.

If our process is in question, we have an aggressive 120 day follow up process including texts and our reps are trained to respond a certain way to SCD leads as GM suggest. I like to think our team does a good job, but there is room for improvement. Here's some base stats from our BDC last month: 829 leads (phone and internet), 233 shows, 102 sold.

Ultimately, as I mentioned above we don't see very good results. Perhaps we'd see better results if we only used the Cobalt site and used SCD in our marketing. Either way, this at least gives you at least some idea of how SCD is performing.

 

[stevepair]

We are not seeing a lot of action from it, however, when I was asking our rep about it they said GM was about to launch a major marketing effort to help educate and push it. So, we'll see.....TrueCar seems to be doing good in our area.