1 in 3 buy sight unseen
CAR buying website autoquake.com reports 35 percent of all customers now buy without seeing the car.
It’s not low-risk budget motors they are buying either: the average spend is £7500!
This shows that car buyers are quickly tuning into the idea of buying cars online. Autoquake says it has helped encourage this with a 7-day money-back guarantee.
Firm founder Fredrik Skantze says that if buyers decide a car isn’t for them, ‘they simply return it to us for a full refund. It makes online car buying risk-free.’
It’s clearly doing the job – Skantze says that 60 percent of car buyers reserve on their very first visit to the site.
‘It shows the confidence that consumers now have with buying goods online – buying a car online now for many, feels like a very natural process.
He says that a further aid to this are full descriptions and a huge amount of images per car. The site shows 40 photographs of each car, so ‘shoppers at Autoquake.com know exactly what they’re buying.’
The firm also has a case study on its books - Claire Scott, who said reasons for buying online included ‘no pressure whatsoever to purchase. Once I’d found the car I wanted I transferred the money online to the Autoquake account which was so simple it was unbelievable.
‘I had my new Golf delivered to me in Somerset from Birmingham, taking the hassle out of me driving all that way to collect it. The guy turned up dead on the dot and talked me through all the paper work and the car itself.
‘I can’t believe that buying a car was so easy.’
Did your car dealership use such a tool, and has it resulted in similar big lead gains for you?
Tags: autoquake, buyer, online
February 10th, 2010 at 11:40 pm
Great to see the start of a move towards online buying (albeit slower than most other industries - many families think nothing of spending several thousand pounds on their annual holiday by booking online…..). As a dealer said to autotorq recently, “we have had people paying deposits blind over the phone for ages (having seen the car on the website) so why wouldnt they pay a deposit online?”. The issue isnt just about consumer readiness, its also about the dealerships readinness/ability to deal with the technicalities like distance selling legislation, online Ts&C’s, refunds, trade-ins etc, that are likely to slow things down - and in some cases, their website providers ability to easily offer the functionality