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Mandatory Digital Retailing tool for Nissan Dealers through CarSaver?

Brian Michael West

Sled Master
Jun 1, 2018
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Nissan is tapping CarSaver for a mandatory digital retailing offering on all websites....but what happens when a dealer says no?

I've been hearing rumors of dealers rejecting the $1,900/mo digital retailing tool and Nissan pressuring them with showing only MSRP on NissanUSA's website.

Can any Nissan dealers add to this discussion? What move will you make? Are you going to fight back against the "mandatory" tool?
 
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Nissan is tapping CarSaver for a mandatory digital retailing offering on all websites....but what happens when a dealer says no?

I've been hearing rumors of dealers rejecting the $1,900/mo digital retailing tool and Nissan pressuring them with showing only MSRP on NissanUSA's website.

Can any Nissan dealers add to this discussion? What move will you make? Are you going to fight back against the "mandatory" tool?
We have better success (leads/conversions), in many cases, bypassing the dealer's websites and reaching buyers earlier in the shopping funnel. There's also more opportunity for conquest sales.

Anything mandatory on a dealer's website is usually a loser for all, dealer, customer, OEM.
 
FCA did this to us as well we have a perfect working digital retailing partner and they yanked it off our site and made us choose a certified vendor. Now they are asking why our web traffic is trending down. I am directing all the traffic I can back to the standalone DRT. We also got creative with texting options and short codes. We are actually doing better this route.
 
Whereas CarSaver has a very nice platform for conducting online transactions, it doesn't fit all.

Digital paperwork tools (what digital retailing should be called) require the dealer to change his world and add more systems to a process that is already quite complicated. And when they're implemented for the consumer to initiate the process things are even worse because the in-store experience isn't setup to work with the online one.

And it is the latter that is the large issue the OEMs don't understand. It takes a consumer AND A DEALER working together to make a car sale happen. If you build a Buy Now button on a website I don't care how fancy the workflow is if the dealer is under-represented. Traditionally, OEMs make this mistake time and time again.

This Digital Paperwork trend is not nearly as necessary as it was in March/April when dealership sales departments were declared non-essential for a few months in a few states. They're all open again. Looking back, less than 8% of consumers actually went through the process. For higher acceptance of Digital Paperwork tools the dealer has to use it as the in-store process.

And what good does that do them?

In most cases the digital paperwork tools cannot match the kind of flexibility desk managers are used to because they were coded by non-car-people. They barely understand how a lease is calculated, so expecting them to comprehend how to move trade equity around or better position dealer cash is waaaaaaaay over their heads. Then one needs to understand the APIs provided by companies like OfferLogix and Market Scan and how those mesh with NADA Guides, AIS, etc.

Lastly, the integrations needed to replace CRM paperwork and DMS printing are crazy expensive. So, your digital paperwork tool is well into the $1,500+ territory to hit margins. And now you're asking a dealer to spend $1,500+ on a certified CRM, $3,000+ on a DMS that works with the financial statement the OEM wants, $500+ on an approved website, and another $900+ on a digital paperwork tool that doesn't work with the CRM, is hacked into the website, and probably doesn't push to the DMS.

Why are digital paperwork tools so much? Expenses in digital paperwork tools per rooftop:
  • Calculation API cost ($100 to $500 a month)
  • Incentives API ($75 to $300 a month)
  • Taxes & Registration feed ($25 to $150 a month)
  • CRM integration ($50 to $150 a month)
  • DMS integration ($50 to $700 a month)
  • Delivery mechanisms like email/texting ($2 to $40 a month)
  • Inventory feed (free to $100 a month)
  • Guide Books ($40 to $100 a month)
  • Trade valuation ($5 to $100 a month)
  • F&I products ($50 to $150 a month)
  • Approval System ($30 to $100 a month)
  • OEM program (5% to 30% of revenue)
  • Cost of engineers
  • Cost of support team
  • Cost of sales team
  • Cost of management
  • Cost of hosting
  • Other items
 
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Then one needs to understand the APIs provided by companies like OfferLogix and Market Scan and how those mesh with NADA Guides, AIS, etc.
Pretty accurate synopsis @Alex Snyder for the most part.

We include Payment Calculation, Incentives, Tax & Reg, Inventory Normalization, Trade Valuation/Equity, Soft-Pull Credit Bureaus, and Lender Waterfall Decisioning with our truPayments API.
 
Nissan is tapping CarSaver for a mandatory digital retailing offering on all websites....but what happens when a dealer says no?

I've been hearing rumors of dealers rejecting the $1,900/mo digital retailing tool and Nissan pressuring them with showing only MSRP on NissanUSA's website.

Can any Nissan dealers add to this discussion? What move will you make? Are you going to fight back against the "mandatory" tool?
Nissan is putting some level of pressure on dealers to sign up, but it is absolutely *not* mandatory, and there is currently no incentive for signing up, and no penalty for not signing up.

Nissan dealers can be a cantankerous bunch when it comes to OEM mandates. Quite frankly, we hate them. And Nissan, to its credit, tends to avoid mandates like this. We can use any website platform we like, for example - that should be universal across all OEM's but obviously isn't.

I would not expect Nissan to make this mandatory. It would unquestionably hurt our business, and cause all sorts of uproar.