Shocker: More People Prefer Online Car Sales To Dealing With Dealers

from the who-woulda-thunk-it? dept

Can you possibly imagine that people wouldn’t like going in to car dealers and buying cars from a profession that seems to be defined by its own sleaze? Indeed, it appears that the less sleaze-inducing internet route for buying cars is picking up steam — with plenty of car purchases originating online. Also, person-to-person car sales have been increasing as the internet has aided that process, and cut out the need for dealers to broker those types of sales. Meanwhile, fewer people seem to be going to the old newspaper classified section to find out about car deals, as it just doesn’t seem efficient any more. The car sellers are looking elsewhere and car buyers prefer going online and avoiding dealers as much as possible as well.


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Comments on “Shocker: More People Prefer Online Car Sales To Dealing With Dealers”

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6 Comments
dorpus says:

Privilege of Trying

Unless you know exactly what you want in advance, retail stores still have their uses for allowing you to test the item before buying it. I bought a pair of shoes at the mall, where the price was competitive with the internet, and they seemed afraid of the net. The mall was necessary to determine what size fits me for that brand. I bought a pair from them, and then bought another pair of similar shoes from the same maker over the net, once I knew that size 11 works.

Tim (user link) says:

Re: Privilege of Trying

Yes, one needs a test-drive, but one can sure research the exact make / model you want online first. (It’s not unknown for me to know more than the local sales-droid anyway by the time I come to sit in a particular car.)

Also there’s the idea of price-matching: I’ve done this twice with buying cameras, gone to shop where I know they have one to take home immediately, and requested they match a reputable online seller’s price (just take a printout of the webpage with you). Could be fun trying to do that with cars…

thecaptain says:

Re: Re: Re: Privilege of Trying

I can also confirm this works with cars.

We recently bought a new car. Process was basically my wife and I sitting down to figure out what we needed and exactly what we could afford.

We then looked at different models and options online got a few quotes with the one we found ideal.

This took about 90 mins on a sunday. Monday night we went to a local dealership, outlined what we had done and found and sure enough we got exactly what we asked for, for the price we found.

The haggling was at a minimum because once the salesman quoted a price that was slightly higher we flatly said we knew what we could afford and it was what we had looked for, anything else and we’d pass and go to the next dealer. The second offer was what we wanted.

Simple.

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