Digital Retailing: The Key to Customer Satisfaction and Profitable Sales

Today, our lives are more busy and more complex than ever before. This complexity has reshaped the retail shopping experience as consumers look for ways to simplify and streamline their buying activities. Even the process of buying a car—one of the biggest purchases most people will ever make—has been transformed, now nearly two out of three shoppers want to complete more of the buying process online compared to their last vehicle purchase.

These fundamental shifts in buying behavior have major implications for your dealership. Given these remarkable changes in consumer preference, your time and profits could be at risk when shoppers can’t choose their own paths to purchase. Fortunately, new digital retailing technologies make it easy to offer personalized online shopping experiences that take the complexity out of car buying, to build trust and more profitable deals.

The High Cost of Inconvenience

Today, there is no single path to purchase for car shoppers. Instead, consumers expect a personalized buying process, that can pick up and start anywhere and often spans multiple devices. Dealerships that don’t align with rising expectations could be wasting time and leaving a lot of money on the table. In fact, a recent analysis of Dealer.com data showed that dealers who allow shoppers to start the buying process online were earning 30 percent higher profit per deal.

It’s easy to see how digital retailing tools can increase efficiency and profit. When working within traditional offline processes, dealerships spend time confirming affordability, checking credit scores, assessing trades, and gathering other information that today’s customers are more than willing to offer up online

The Value of Digital Retailing

To accommodate today’s convenience-driven consumers and provide a more personalized process, your dealership needs a streamlined and integrated digital retailing platform. Digital retailing solutions—like Accelerate My Deal from Dealer.com—help shoppers start the car buying process on their own terms by providing a consistent experience across your website, Autotrader listings, and on Kelley Blue Book. From there, they drive their own guided, personalized shopping experience. Whether online or in the dealership, shoppers have an intuitive, enjoyable experience that naturally promotes trust and satisfaction. In fact, heavy digital buyers spend 37 fewer minutes, on average, at the dealership—an invaluable benefit to today’s busy, overprogrammed consumers.

The value of digital retailing goes beyond increased customer satisfaction. With the ability to integrate with VinSolutions Connect CRM and other platforms, Accelerate My Deal provides dealers with seamless deal workflows, allowing them to simplify the sales process and save time. You can also ensure that every point of the online deal structure aligns to your in-store operations, further promoting efficiency and time savings.

Even better, Accelerate My Deal from Dealer.com leads to more profitable deals. The platform’s thoughtful, data-driven user interface makes it easy for shoppers to start their deals online, so they’re five times more likely to submit a lead and 33 percent more likely to convert. Of course, more leads and more conversions mean more money for your dealership. In fact, Accelerate My Deal leads earn 25 percent more front-end gross profit and 24 percent more back-end gross profit than traditional leads.

Customer Convenience Can’t Wait

The retail environment has changed, and car buyers expect the same level of convenience from your dealership that they experience in other retail situations. Flexibility, personalization, and an excellent online experience are more important than ever. For many dealerships, a powerful and flexible digital retailing solution like Accelerate My Deal from Dealer.com is the key to boosting efficiency, loyalty, and profits because it facilitates the experience that shoppers expect. Learn more about Accelerate My Deal and start enjoying more profitable deals today.