Digital Dealer - December 2017 - 20

By Devin Daly
CEO and Co-Founder,
SpinCar

// Sales
Strategy

Vehicle
Merchandising:
Use Features
Not Price
As technology has
advanced, vehicle
pricing through informational third-party sites has
become more front and
center for consumers.
Just think about most
third-party sites...what is
the primary message they
have in common? Price.
With vehicle pricing
tools, such as vAuto
becoming the main way
dealers value and price
their inventory, some
unique features tend to
get lost in the shuffle.
Let's face it, vehicles
are not all the same,
even those that are the
same make, model and
mileage. So, how do
you convince a customer searching through
hundreds of vehicles on a
third-party listing service
that your vehicle is priced
higher because it is a
better value?
The answer? Great
vehicle merchandising.
Dealers typically operate in a similar manner
when it comes to vehicle
merchandising, with a
20

DECEMBER 2017

standard process for photos, exploding a VIN, etc.
The only way many dealers make a vehicle stand
out, is price. If I were a
realtor, I could remodel
the kitchen and upgrade
the house to increase its
value. You can't really do
that with a vehicle and

The problem is that, because of these standard
processes, the vehicle
images tend to have no
character or personality.
Sure, you can take
very high-quality images
and video. However,
most dealers still resort
to price to differentiate

THE BOTTOM
LINE IS THAT IT
IS IMPORTANT TO
TREAT EACH VEHICLE
DIFFERENTLY IN YOUR
MERCHANDISING
PROCESS."
that is why most dealers
leverage price to make
their vehicles stand out.
As an industry, we
understand the value of
images when it comes to
inventory merchandising.
We've progressed from
the days of no photos,
to a couple, to some dealers who now display 40
images or more. Video is
also increasingly used for
inventory merchandising.

D I G I TA L D E A L E R . C O M

their vehicles and make
them stand out because
that is what EVERY other
dealer does. When a
customer is browsing for
Honda Civics, they have
a few hundred, maybe
even a thousand different
combinations of features
and specs to choose
from. Most dealers have
tons of images and a video - but there is nothing
to differentiate one from

the other, so the customer is forced to weed
out vehicles and narrow
down their choice purely
by price.
Well, guess what? That
doesn't have to be the
case!
If a customer were
on your lot looking at
a specific vehicle, no
salesperson would simply
show them a random list
of every standard feature
and let them sort it out
for themselves. Yet this is
exactly what is happening online. Don't force
the customer to identify
vehicles that contain the
features and options
most important to them
by wading through lists
of hundreds of features
generated by VIN explosions and fail to do the
one thing that a salesperson would do with the
customer in front of them:
sell the features of the
actual vehicle.
If that customer were
to ask the salesperson
why the vehicle is priced
higher than similar vehicles they researched on
their smartphone while on
the dealership's lot, the
salesperson would point
out the differentiators for
this specific vehicle that
justify the higher price.
Perhaps the truck is
lifted, has a heavy-duty
towing package, navigation, or a specific trim
level. There are countless
reasons why Ford F-150
A is different from Ford
F-150 B. You wouldn't
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Digital Dealer - December 2017
