The “front door” is moving away from dealers

[DjSec]

Ford CPO vehicles are now on Amazon.
Consumers can shop, finance, and buy directly through Amazon and then just pick the car up at a local Ford dealer.

Here’s the part nobody wants to say out loud:

OEMs force dealers to use website platforms that are slow, limited, restrictive, and impossible to optimize. So when a company like Amazon offers a cleaner, faster, transparent buying experience… it becomes very easy for them to replace the industry’s “front door.”

And that’s exactly what’s happening.

Amazon now owns:

• The first click
• The search
• The product recommendations
• The shopping experience

Dealers (for now) still own:

• The inventory
• The pricing
• The delivery
• The paperwork
• Service, warranty, and backend products

This isn’t Amazon “selling cars.”
This is Amazon owning the experience people actually want and pushing dealers away from the first hello.

 

[Richie K]

Amazon is a monster that eats everything in its path. What will happen to dealerships 10, 15, 20 years from now? Will we exist?

 

[DjSec]

Amazon is a monster that eats everything in its path. What will happen to dealerships 10, 15, 20 years from now? Will we exist?

Not in their current form and especially not if their websites stay the way they are today.

Dealers won’t disappear, but the version of a dealership that survives the next 10–20 years is nothing like what we have now.

This isn’t about trying to beat Amazon, CarGurus, or Cars.com at their own game.
Dealers will never out-engineer or out-scale them.

But dealers don’t need to beat Amazon’s platform, they need to beat Amazon’s experience ... and that starts with their website.

Right now most dealer sites:

• Hide pricing
• Force lead forms
• Load slowly
• Use generic templates
• Don’t match shopper intent
• Have broken filters or bad inventory structure
• Are designed around OEM restrictions rather than customer needs
• Aren’t built for how people actually shop

When your website is frustrating, confusing, and slow, you’re practically inviting Amazon to take the first click away from you.

Dealers win by turning their site into something Amazon can’t replicate:

• Instant clarity
• Real transparency
• Fast LCP and Core Web Vitals
• Clean, structured inventory data
• Human guidance, not corporate templates
• Landing pages that answer shopper questions better than marketplaces
• A buying journey designed around the customer, not the OEM

If a dealership’s website becomes the best, simplest, fastest, most trustworthy place to shop locally…

that dealership keeps the front door.
Amazon can’t take what you don’t give away.

The danger isn’t Amazon.
The danger is letting your website stay stuck in 2005 while the platforms design the future.