By: Earl Brown, Autofusion (2023)
Are conversions on your dealership website happening BECAUSE of your UX (User Experience), or DESPITE it? In the retail automotive industry, we try to solve transportation problems, it is our core function after all, but a lot of car dealer websites these days seem to create barriers for shoppers. Think about the average car dealership’s online shopping experience for a moment, from the perspective of the average car shopper…
What must it be like as a consumer to click onto a car dealer’s website looking for specific information regarding a potential vehicle purchase, only to be diverted, distracted, and often left more confused with every click or scroll? As you might imagine, it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.
It’s almost like some dealer sites are designed to prevent conversions in this way. The disconnect seems to be between website providers who build sites to appease dealers (and co-op requirements) – and others who design sites to solve problems and provide value to shoppers, so that they will trust, convert, and buy. Just look through your Google Analytics 4 dashboard, the evidence of friction and shopper dissatisfaction is likely all over the place. There are plenty of GA4 explorations and reports that can help you better understand what sort of roadblocks your shoppers are hitting during their journey.
Truth be told, car buyers are pretty simple. They want accurate, relevant, and transparent informationthat helps them find and learn more about your product and process, and most of all, they want to put the buying process in their rear-view mirror. They don’t like wasted time or patronizing gimmicks, and their impression of your dealership are heavily influenced by what they see on your website.
What happens when shoppers land on YOUR site? Does the customer journey feel a little jerky and disjointed, or is there a clear path forward to a sale? Is it full of slow-loading frills, arbitrary widgets, “gotcha” forms, sterile landing pages and dated sliders, ineffective pop-ups and coupons? Is your SRP full of vehicles you sold months ago? Are your VDP’s so overloaded with buttons that they create CTA-fatigue?
In recent years, shoppers have been trained to expect incredibly rich, intuitive, and hassle-free user experiences in essentially every retail vertical except for Automotive. A simplified process is a big factor in the meteoric rise of online retailers like Vroom and Carvana. These companies have been very successful at leveraging negative consumer sentiment to disrupt traditional retail dealers. For all their obvious flaws, they built optimized user experiences perfectly tailored to the needs of average shoppers, and were rewarded with enormous market-share growth.
Consumer patience is limited, so your online shopping VPM (value-per-minute) needs to be through the roof. Simply put, modern shoppers require tangible and relevant information for their time, and there are no shortcuts around that fact. Autofusion helps dealers like you develop road-tested modern retailing solutions to bridge the gap between traditional and digital retail.
Whether you’re looking to re-design your website and retail funnel from the ground up, or you just need better tools on your site to keep your shoppers more engaged, we’ve got you covered. Take a look at the product write-ups for our Complete Website Solution, Custom Order Tool , Vehicle Matchmaker, and TalkExpress conversational commerce platform, for fresh ideas on how to build the perfect retail funnel for your dealership.
Our Custom Order (Build & Price) Shopping Tool Is Nearly 300% More Engaging Than The Average Dealer Website. These shoppers spend nearly 4 minutes on avg using our software to learn more about your product, which has led to over 45,000 high quality lead submissions (as of this writing).
Book a consultation and demo with our sales team today, or send us an email at sales@autofusion.com to get the wheels turning.
