Faster sales at higher profit, with delivery to customers further afield than ever before, are the latest headline evidence for the growing strength of online motor retail.
Online car supermarket BuyaCar.co.uk has revealed that stock typically turns 7% faster on its website than the average dealer achieves on a physical site.
Cars are also sold more profitably – measured against CAP Retail values – and delivered further afield than previously, according to BuyaCar’s latest analysis of performance.
BuyaCar.co.uk is now recruiting more dealer partners in the wake of record summer sales. Having focused historically on guaranteeing to take on the distance selling risk and delivery of internet sales, which many dealers remain wary of, the company now also points to proven performance improvements overall.
Because it sells cars on behalf of dealers, rather than competing with them, the company believes an unpredictable future market which continues to be affected by local lockdowns and pressure on supply makes its additional sales channel an essential partner for traditional dealers.
For example, the company provided a lifeline for dealers forced to close their doors between March and June, delivering just under £6 million of cars to key workers and other essential drivers when the wider industry ground to an almost complete halt.
But even under normal market conditions BuyaCar has revealed that cars on its site sell on average more quickly than from a dealer forecourt alone.
That figure reached as high as 10.6 days faster than a forecourt sale, just ahead of the Coronavirus lockdown. As dealers benefitted from the lifting of quarantine during the summer months and enjoyed a rush of local customers that figure settled back to an average of 4.1 days during the year to date – a 7% improvement in stockturn.
Sold prices on BuyaCar.co.uk are also consistently higher than CAP Retail by an average of 4.1%.
And as more customers have gone online this year to buy cars, the average distance of a BuyaCar customer from the supplying dealership has also risen to 164 miles.
The business believes that the extraordinary circumstances of 2020 provide the strongest evidence yet of a consumer move online and how dealers can benefit, without the need for their own investment in e-Commerce infrastructure.
Andy Oldham, Chief Executive of BuyaCar, said: “What the extraordinary circumstances of this year show is that BuyaCar boosts dealer performance when times are good, while providing an essential lifeline when times are bad.
“The holy grail for dealers is a combination of faster stockturn, at higher profit to a bigger customer base and BuyaCar’s latest performance analysis shows that all three can be achieved without additional investment or disruption.
“As we begin to enter a more uncertain fourth quarter, we expect to see more dealers boost business as well as hedge against future market disruption by partnering with BuyaCar.”
*Article Source www.BuyaCar.co.uk
