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?

 

[jackcarlson]

I’m not surprised by the 7%. Most VDPs are a mess. You land on the page and it’s just a wall of CTAs, dense paragraphs, badges, pop-ups, and tools all fighting for attention. There’s no clear path for how a normal buyer is supposed to think through the decision. It feels like a failure because the experience creates cognitive overload instead of confidence. If the page itself feels stressful, of course people bail and go talk to a human (which also may be stressful...)

 

[DealerInt]

7% of buyers report purchasing entirely online
7% of buyers report purchasing entirely online
7% of buyers report purchasing entirely online
7% of buyers report purchasing entirely online
7% of buyers report purchasing entirely online

According to the latest Cox Automotive Car Buyer Journey Study: Report Summary 2025
ONLY 7% of buyers report purchasing entirely online.

ALL that damn work during the Covid years, manufacturers shoving online buying services down our throats and making it MANDATORY to have on our dealer websites. Company after company scrambling to capitalize. Acquisitions to have a solution to for dealers.

"Digital Retailing" wasn't just the new buzzword in the industry, TOTAL - from beginning to end online vehicle purchasing was going to revolutionize how dealers sold vehicles and how consumers were going to save time buying their next vehicle from a dealership.

BUT DID IT?

Dealers scrambled to offer a solution to this new wave of online BUYERS. BUT in many cases it proved to be a nuisance, became a commodity of the tech bundle and another standard service the OEMs forced upon us.

Most of us gave it an honest effort to make it work but seems as if MOST of us in the business and on the dealer side already KNEW how it was going to end.

Here we are, 5 years later and only 7% of buyers report purchasing a vehicle entirely online.

What happened - Are you surprised?

The 7% stat makes sense when you think about where deals actually fall apart — it's not the channel, it's the desk. A customer can start online, get a payment quote, show up in person, and still walk out paying something completely different because of what happens between the manager and the salesperson in the last 20 minutes.

Digital retailing never solved that. It just moved the top of the funnel online while leaving the most opaque part of the transaction completely unchanged.

Curious if others are seeing this — do your GMs have visibility into why deals deviate from the original desk structure, or is it mostly reconstructed after the fact?

 

[tylernobi]

@Steve Stauning 's data point about DR leads closing at 7-8% vs. 23%+ for standard inquiries is striking. I think the industry conflated "digital retailing" (completing a full transaction online) with "digital shopping" (researching, narrowing, and building confidence online before visiting the store).

Most buyers don't want to buy a car the way they buy shoes. But they absolutely want to search, filter, compare, and feel confident before they walk in. The 63% who want a blended experience are telling us something: invest in the digital shopping experience, not the digital closing experience. That's where the real conversion lift lives.

 

[DealerInt]

@tylernobi That distinction between 'digital shopping' and 'digital retailing' is the exact right way to frame it. The industry definitely conflated the two.

But if we agree that the future is this 'blended experience' (they build confidence online, but finalize in the store), that brings us right back to the physical desk being the ultimate bottleneck.

When you invest heavily in that 'digital shopping experience,' you create a highly educated buyer who walks into the showroom firmly anchored to very specific online math. When they sit down in the box and that online math hits the reality of the physical desk (actual trade appraisals, realistic credit tiers, taxes), friction explodes.

That 'blended' transition is exactly where I see deals fall apart or bleed gross. The online payment doesn't match the desking software, the salesperson panics about losing the customer, and they run to the tower asking the manager to discount the car just to honor the website's math.

We optimised the top of the funnel (shopping), but we left the bottom of the funnel (the desk and the margin) completely exposed. Curious if you see that same friction point when those 63% of 'blended' buyers actually sit down in the chair?"