With 95% of car buyers beginning their vehicle search online, according to buyer journey platform Invoca, isn’t it imperative that your online used-car marketing does two critical things:
- Explain the vehicle’s market value – its worth and the evidence, such as OEM equipment, add-on options, service and accident histories, and reconditioning investment, including market demand and vehicle uniqueness, and it must:
- Build up buyer confidence so they recognize the value they’re considering to purchase from you.
Start improving the transparency of your online merchandising by auditing your existing listings for quality and clarity. Focus on image quality and eliminating photo background distractions. Shoppers see images before anything else. Do not underestimate the importance of these basic marketing steps.
The objective is to build shopper trust in your used vehicles’ reliability, safety, and performance qualities and in how your dealership conducts itself in consumers’ eyes.
Done well, these steps help merchandise your assets online in ways that mitigate cost-concession questions, sell the car, and retain margin.
Market Value, Sure, but Pump Confidence Value
The necessity of building online trust and confidence value is a carry-over from long-time consumer opinion of the car-buying experience. Noted Group Decision and Negotiation magazine, in a 2021 report on price negotiations in the online used car market:
“Since potential buyers cannot physically examine the product quality during online sales, information asymmetries and consequently uncertainty and mistrust that already exist in offline sales are exacerbated in online markets.”
The study said authenticated data can change seller and buyer behaviors to clearer and less complex negotiation processes, promote honesty, and resolve trust issues.
Monetary Value of Building Vehicle Trustworthiness
The financial reality of these two strategies shows that digital vehicle portfolios and other online merchandising tools help achieve higher margins and faster sales. The following table is based on metrics modeled on industry benchmarks that measure how front-end gross profit and days-to-turn are affected when dealerships move away from static, commodity-style pricing and toward transparent digital merchandising:
Online merchandising that builds vehicle confidence, as in this 2022 model comparison chart, delivers a 7.5% price advantage, $2,500 absolute gain. Resulting margin expansion occurs because transparent digital merchandising eliminates informational friction, 122-plus percent gross profit lift.
How to Merchandise As the Sale Depended on It
How your dealership merchandises its used inventory – utilizing presentation tools from online vehicle display pages to VDPs to Digital Vehicle Portfolio (DVP) authentication that delivers before shoppers all essential transparency points of the used car they’re shopping.
To web listings’ display pages, the DVP adds confidence-building facts such as service records, OEM factory details, and often build sheets, reconditioning and collision inspection reports, and warranty documents to justify pricing and build transparency.
Seamless integration of this technology into the dealership’s CRM and DMS ensures that all pertinent vehicle information in your inventory is continuously updated and readily accessible, streamlining the connection between potential buyers and the sales team. A dealership will often email this portfolio to phone inquirers.
When they click on it, customers are greeted with an array of documents and media that resemble an organized digital folder. This folder answers almost every question the shopper might have about this vehicle, such as:
1. What specific repairs or maintenance have been done? Were any major parts replaced?
2. What do the safety reports cover? Are there any outstanding recalls or issues?
3. Is there a detailed history report included? How many previous owners has the car had, and was it ever involved in an accident?
Yet most dealerships continue to invest resources in managing market value and overlook confidence. Confidence value, McKinzie notes, emotionally engages shoppers in the vehicle of interest and reduces buyer friction.
Dealerships that introduce fully optimized digital vehicle portfolios see significant consumer engagement, resulting in an average open rate of 68% on digital portfolios, our engagement data shows.
“How do we increase buyer confidence?” Dealerships that win won’t just have the best inventory—they’ll do the best job of proving why it’s worth buying. Given that nearly all car shoppers start their purchase journey online, the online showroom and lot must project trustworthiness, which means using online merchandising tools like digital vehicle portfolios designed to do just that.
About Rapid Recon
Reconditioning workflow automation from Rapid Recon is the industry standard in time-to-line inventory turn and speed-to-sale vehicle revenue enhancement for automotive retailers. Benchmarking data based on 13 million vehicles processed uniquely positions Rapid Recon to advise dealers on how to improve their store’s profitability. Used by more than 2,000 dealerships, Rapid Recon ensures the accountability of processes, property, and people. Hence, dealers know answers quickly, find assets anywhere, and sell vehicles promptly to grow dealership profitability. www.rapidrecon.com CALL US: +650‑999‑0497