ONLY 7% of buyers report purchasing entirely online - Digital Retailing FAILED?

[Jeff Kershner]

 

[TJThompson]

The bolt on DR sites is a disaster and was never going to work. Creates all kinds of confusion as often the car is shown including price etc. on the dealer site and then the 'shop.dealersite.com' as well creating weird navigation issues, new windows, bad integration, forced to login to yet another system to see a lead and so on and so on.

 

[Mico Silver]

We've tracked and measured these issues for more than a decade. In short:

1. A DR CTA that vomits payments on the customer before they've entered any data reduce conversions. ("Oh, $950 a month? I can't afford that.")
2. DR tools that take the customer away from the dealer website and make it hard to return reduce overall conversions (even when you add the DR conversions back into the total).
3. "Accurate" DR tools that build the entire deal for someone who lives in the market reduce closing percentages. Why? Because the customer already has all the information and either decides that now is not the time to buy or to shop your numbers with your competitors. (One recent example I can point to is a small Midwest group who closes their DR leads at 7-8%, yet closes their dealer website "Check Availability" leads at 23%+ - and all other metrics with the Check Availability leads are higher: Connection Rate, Set Rate, Show Rate, Appointment Close Rate. And no, adding a DR tool did not increase their total leads from website visitors. In fact, these were flat-to-down as a percentage of engaged users once the DR tool was added.)

Do you believe there is any way to measure the number of customer you lose by hiding information behind leadgates? If I shop and a payment is important to me, when you don't have a DRT - I will go to Edmunds.com loan calculator, which is my experience is the best, or if it's a lease - I will go to Leasehacker, and both of them will do their best to distract me and to submit a lead to one of their customer-dealers, or in the case of leasehacker - a broker.
So the information is out there, why would you push your customers to 3rd party when I am already on your website?