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Revenge Of The Car Salesman
from the beating-down-the-internet dept
A good look at why the internet hasn't destroyed car dealers. It would seem that the internet would be a perfect tool to get rid of car dealers, but it simply hasn't turned out that way. Fortune goes into a fair amount of detail to explain why. Apparently, it's not particularly easy to sell cars, and just "jumping in" to the business doesn't work well.
Reader Comments
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Actually...
..a friend and I were just discussing this the other day about what types of businesses are a good idea to try over the internet, and which are bad, and we basically said what this article is saying. Research for cars over the internet is a great idea, and referring people to dealers also works well. However, even for new cars, people don't want to look at pictures and order, they want to get in, to see what's under the hood, take it for a test drive - they want to experience what they're spending so much money for. Testing these attributes are especially important for used cars, as the article points. But when people invest a huge amount of money in something, they usually wish to experience it, rather than look at pictures - would you buy a house just looking at pictures? Or a car, or an entire living room set? But of course, many businesses are still taking baby steps - in order for someone to say that an idea is stupid, someone else has to do it first, so kudos to those who tried, failed, and helped us to determine what won't succeed.
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Re: Actually...
I definitely agree. However, I think it was with a bit of hubris that some folks jumped into the online car business insisting that they knew the best way for it to work when many of them had no experience in the actual car business...
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