The consumer car-buying journey has evolved, and dealerships need to evolve with it. Today, 69 percent of shoppers say they want to conduct more of the vehicle-buying process from home, particularly price negotiations and trade-in estimates. This preference has remained unchanged year-over-year since 2021, and it’s unlikely to reverse course any time soon.
Relatedly, approximately 71 percent of consumers surveyed in the 2023 Cox Automotive Car Buyer Journey Study indicated they would likely use a hybrid approach for their next vehicle purchase, that is, combining online and in-person activities at the dealership. Of those who would prefer to shop exclusively online versus exclusively in person, 21 percent preferred to conduct the entire transaction online. In comparison, just eight percent said they would prefer to shop only at a dealership.
When over two-thirds of an industry’s customers want to shop online, that industry would be remiss if it didn’t take advantage of its customers’ preferred shopping habits. This is far too often the case with dealerships. Discounting and dismissing the importance of online shopping means dealerships will miss out on a significant amount of revenue—including in-person purchases—while those that embrace the hybrid approach have a significant advantage over the competition.
What Are The Problems With Dealerships’ Websites?
Building the ideal website for automotive e-commerce is no easy task, and it’s fair for dealers not to know all the best approaches or common pitfalls. However, there are three pervasive problems with most dealership websites that should be reviewed immediately.
1) Websites do not meet Google’s basic performance standards. Google Core Web Vitals (CWV), introduced by Google’s Chrome Team in early 2020, sets essential benchmarks for website performance and user experience, focusing on loading speed, interactivity and visual stability. Meeting CWV metrics is critical for search engine optimization (SEO), which helps users find a website. When they get to a website, CWVs directly reflect how good a user’s experience is on that website.
Google rewards websites that pass CWVs with the opportunity for better organic search rankings and stronger ROI on Google Ads performance. There is a direct correlation between passing the assessment and significantly better buyer conversions. Businesses that fail the assessment experience the opposite.
A recent analysis conducted by Overfuel examined over 2,600 websites by the top 50 dealership groups in North America, which were ranked by Automotive News’ 2024 list of top dealership groups based on car sales volume. Overfuel’s analysis found that less than one percent of the top 50 dealership websites passed basic Google Core Web Vital metrics. This means the vast majority of dealership websites rank abysmally in search results, ad performance and user experience.
2) Technology choices are limited. Often, automotive Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) determine the technology dealerships can use and who they can partner with, from website vendors to online scheduling tools, digital retail solutions and more. That means OEM-approved vendors have no incentive to innovate, resulting in decades of disparate software solutions and widgets. Four years after CWV’s release, very few of these legacy technologies, if any, have responded to these changes in website performance standards. In most cases, it may have only gotten worse.
The landscape of OEM-approved and required vendors is too narrow. Strict and often outdated mandates stifle innovation in dealership websites and prevent healthy competition. Ultimately, this not only leads to revenue loss for dealerships but it also negatively impacts consumers.
3) Use of third-party plugins is at an all-time high, hindering speed and performance. Website load speed is crucial for sales. According to a study by SOASTA Research on the state of online retail performance, there is a 20 percent lead conversion loss for every second it takes for a mobile website to load. In automotive, the proliferation of website plugins and widgets has had a direct, noticeably negative impact on website speed.
Google introduced a new Core Web Vital in 2024, Interaction to Next Paint (INP), which is the first metric directly scrutinizing third-party plugins. When a consumer clicks a website element like a button, INP measures the delay between when the button is clicked and when the intended action actually happens.
One ubiquitous example would be the increasingly popular cookie consent banner: the user clicks “I accept cookies,” and there’s a noticeable delay in the cookie banner disappearing. Unfortunately, the most popular cookie banner company in automotive causes INP failure for every website it’s installed on. The same goes for live chat; research shows the “close” button on live chat prompts is the most clicked element across all mobile website traffic. It, too, causes INP failure across the board.
Keeping Up with Today’s Car Buyer
Dealerships relying on third-party widgets to generate leads have been the status quo, but the modern car shopper is savvier. Every third-party plugin incorporated into a website not only hinders performance but also lowers conversion rate largely due to pop-ups, prompts or other tactics that distract or frustrate consumers.
In a showroom, the #1 objective is to get a customer into a car—not frustrate them—so why should the website be any different?
Subpar website performance is closing the door on considerable revenue. These problems are common, and there’s a great deal of room for improvement. The OEM brands and dealer groups that recognize issues on their own websites—and ultimately do something to improve them—will have an instant competitive advantage over groups that do not. Some dealers may disagree, but in this case, the data is always right.
management and rich analytics. A seasoned software and product leader, Alex has a proven track record of building enterprise SaaS applications and has worked with Fortune 500 companies such as Disney+, Best Buy and Home Depot, among others.
