I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: consumers today are frustrated and tired of the same old tedious, stressful car-buying experience. According to a 2016 AutoTrader study, less than 1 percent of consumers prefer the current car-buying experience. Buying a vehicle is a highly emotional process. Consumers must consider whether or not they can afford the vehicle they love, if their choice is the best choice for their needs, whether they are getting a good deal, and ultimately, if they trust the dealer.

While consumers’ expectations continue to shift, additional digital retailing trends are putting added pressure on dealerships to adapt their processes and technology to better serve their customers.

So, how do we address these concerns and build a more sustainable future for dealerships?

1. Identify the important (and sometimes cumbersome) parts of buying a car in store, and build out their digital equivalents online

Shoppers today have indicated they want a change in the way they purchase vehicles – many do not want to negotiate. However, they do want to handle some of the pieces on their own, in the comfort of their homes. To stay relevant in the retail experience, it’s essential to tailor the technology your company utilizes to be “pro-customer.” The reason Blockbuster, taxis, and hotels are challenged by companies such as Netflix, Uber and AirBnB is because they weren’t focused on the real wants and needs of their customers. The moment more accessible options became available, their customers disappeared for good. Brand loyalty is extremely fickle – especially in retail.

Whether a shopper is payment driven, trade driven, credit focused, or protection oriented, every step to the final sale can be digitized and done on a tablet, on a couch or with a salesperson in-store — all with the help of good technology and process.

2. Understand the customer journey – the showroom is still key 

Contrary to popular belief, technology is not making brick and mortar retail obsolete. The true future of retail is at the intersection of e-commerce and brick and mortar. Eighty-three percent of in-market shoppers believe that simply doing something online will save them time – and 78 percent said they value the in-store experience. Shockingly, 70 percent of the millennials that we surveyed indicated they prefer to spend more time in the dealership. There are many different ways to add value to the shopper’s experience, but focusing on solutions for added convenience outside the dealership is not always the answer. To truly address the issue, it’s essential to creatively reimagine points of contention that can use tools that are already available. From there, you can either streamline to improve the in-store experience or take them out of the in-store process all together.

3. Build the right processes with the right people

Technology and applications are completely meaningless without people and process. Your leadership team needs to develop a strategy, implement new processes to meet the goals of the strategy, and begin to leverage the right providers that can enable those processes. This will help move you towards a digital retailing approach that is appropriate for your store.   

It takes solutions, people and processes to serve all our needs. When these three factors are all aligned, we have the capability to help move our industry forward in big ways. And in the end, successful digital retailing should create a trusted car-buying experience, reduce dealers’ costs, and sell more cars.  

In March 2018, Google made a change that could have a major impact on websites and how sites will rank on search engines. Google has begun “mobile-first indexing,” which means it now indexes the mobile version of a site rather than the desktop version of a website as it has done historically.  

What does this mean for your website?

Does your dealership prioritize content for the desktop version of your website?  If you do, your site may lose visibility in search results once Google indexes the mobile version of your site.

If you’re not sure what this means for your website, ask yourself: does the site content a shopper sees on their desktop screen match the content they see on their mobile phone?  If your website has a true responsive design you’re set to benefit from Google’s shift to mobile-first as your content is the same.

Here’s a simple test to check if your site will remain visible in the Google mobile-first web.

• Do a side-by-side comparison of your website on a mobile phone and a desktop computer
• View your homepage and other key pages, e.g. landing pages, promotional content, search results page, etc. 
• Does the content on your mobile site match the content on your desktop site? 

If your site content doesn’t match, your website provider is likely not offering you a true responsive web experience — the Google recommended design platform.

Based on Google’s recommendations, here are three ways to help your site benefit from the shift to mobile-first web:

1. Responsive over adaptive/agile

Websites built on a true responsive platform use a single version of content that scales in size to fit all screens: mobile, desktop, tablet, etc. A dealer with all their site content included in their mobile version will potentially be rewarded with a boost in Google search rankings.

In the mobile-first web, websites that are adaptive, seamless or agile could result in the dealer’s desktop content not being visible on a mobile phone, which puts the dealer at risk to not rank in search after Google indexes the dealer’s mobile site.

2. Use structured data categories

Structured data is a format that can help search engines understand the contents of a page/website.   Google also uses structured data to generate snippets to use in a shopper’s search results. Using different structured data categories such as vehicles, business information, hours and reviews, etc. can help a site rank higher in Google search results.

3. Optimize the hero for mobile-first

The hero is a dealer’s marquee for attracting a shopper’s attention and clicks.  However, some dealers impede their site’s performance and speed by using large PNG files for the hero. To ensure a site continues to perform well and shoppers enjoy fast page load speeds, your hero image should be a jpeg file that’s less than 120kbs in size and can easily fit key screen sizes.

The Google updates aren’t arbitrary; they reflect a shift in consumer shopping behavior that has been growing for years. In prioritizing mobile websites over desktop, Google is legitimizing this shift in consumer behavior.

If you’re unsure your website will take advantage of Google’s new updates, reach out to me.  Our CDK team will help you optimize your site so you can benefit from the move to the mobile-first web.