I've stated this over and over at various conferences. So I'll put it in writing.
Companies like cars.com et al, exist because we as dealerships allowed a vacuum to form. Consumers wanted to research online and we didn't change fast enough to what they wanted.
Ever hear of Buzzillions? When is the last time you heard people talk about what they read on Epinions or Reevoo? These sites used to be the hottest things out there. Then companies started posting their own reviews. Newegg.com took a huge risk years ago and put their reviews, good and bad, directly on their site. Now their reviews are considered some of the most trustworthy. The entire ecommerce industry embraced reviews. Those with the most success are the most open. The sites that did reviews became unnecessary.
Ecommerce saw these review sites as a threat and realized the easiest way to knock down their relevance was to get in front of them.
You hear how car buyers hit 18 sites on average before purchasing a car and dealers think that is great. Why? In ecommerce you learned that every time a customer had to leave to get information you raised the chance of losing them for good.
Here is a short list of what ecommerce did to streamline and knock off exits from the sites. These are all things that believe it or not, didn't exist on a majority of ecommerce or web sites at one time.
Search - There are still places that don't have a search feature. Expecting instead for the customer to slog through the site and still be happy when they find what they are looking for.
Communication - There was an attitude early on that a phone number was enough. Then just a phone number. Now you have feedback forms right on the site, chat, or click to call.
Reviews - Give your customers a voice right on your site. Dirty little secret in the ecommerce industry, the standard is any review with 3 or fewer stars are considered a customer service issue and referred to a CSR.
Pictures of products - Yeah, there was a time when if a site had 1 picture it was a miracle.
Customer video of product - These are gaining ground in a lot of sites. One of the best videos I ever posted on a site was a consumer nearly setting themselves on fire with our product. We called out all the things they did wrong and why they we say in the manual not to do it. It was deleted a couple of weeks later, so win-win.
Shipping charges and tracking - Hard to believe but there was a time not long ago when you had no idea what the shipping would cost or when your order would arrive. You had to go to UPS or FedEx and get a rough estimate.
Manuals and direction videos - Manuals were some of the first things added to ecommerce. I bought a saw the other day purely because their video showed that it would flush cut at the angle I needed. I spent about double what I planned. Manuals can answer a lot of questions about a product.
Personalization - About 10 years ago ecommerce realized that when you make it a more personal experience you create a stronger connection. Car sites are just now realizing this and remembering what people looked at and who they are.
Security - Throw that security badge up, show the customer they are safe giving their information. So many car sites make this horrible mistake. They Iframe in a credit app. The app is secure on the vendor site, but the browser shows that the page being used as a porthole by the dealer isn't safe. Guess what, people won't trust their information with you.
Standards - Account info, cart and search in the upper right. Customer service and phone info in the footer. Click on the logo for the home page. All of those are considered "standard" ecommerce rules. Sure, Amazon started it but they forced everyone else to do that same layout. Next time you are on a site and ask "where is the...?" you'll realize that you are on a site trying to be clever and failing.
I constantly say that the car industry is about 10 years behind ecommerce. Every time a dealer says, "Well the car industry is different" I remember how many times I heard that when the printing industry became computerized. They were convinced that computers had no place in printing because they were different. Most of the people were very resistant to change. Their industry had a monumental shift and thousands found out that burying their heads didn't help until it was too late. It turned out printers were actually one of the industries changed the most by computerization.
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