Streamlining Your Vehicle Acquisition Process: Part Two

If you missed part one of this two-part blog series, we took an in-depth look at how dealers have historically found and acquired vehicles as well as uncovered the common challenges that dealerships face during customer and vehicle acquisition.

Alongside these challenges are also complex decisions that dealers must make to ensure the process runs according to plan. In part two, we take a closer look at these decisions and what dealerships can do to optimize and improve vehicle acquisition from start to finish.

Simplifying a Complex Vehicle Acquisition Process

Dealers have to make a lot of complex decisions during the vehicle acquisition process. This decision complexity comes down to a few different pain points.

Vehicle Cost of Ownership

While this may seem pretty straightforward, it’s sometimes more difficult to pinpoint the price that a dealership owns a car for. Even if you purchased a car for $18,000, there’s still the cost of reconditioning, oil changes, tires, windshields, and even transport costs. These expenses must be considered when figuring out the total cost of owning a vehicle. So, while the initial cost was $18,000, the cost of owning that vehicle now could be closer to $20,000+.

Vehicle Age 

Dealerships do not like aged inventory. Some dealers will keep a car for a certain length of time, and then once that time has passed, they will dispose of the car, regardless of what they own it for. For these dealers, their focus is on keeping their inventory as fresh as possible. They feel there’s no benefit to holding onto old products and old inventory.

Vehicle Price

As a dealer, how do you ensure you’re getting the best price for your vehicle acquisitions? This has to do with what a dealer should pay for a car and what the right price is to mark that car on the floor. In this industry, prices can fluctuate depending on how popular a car is or how long a car has been sitting on your lot. 

Within the decisions that dealers need to make, there are also other important factors to consider, like:

• What kind of vehicles does your dealership need?
• Which ones are selling the best and moving the fastest? 
• What does your current inventory look like?
• What cars are selling poorly? 
• How long are poorly-selling vehicles staying on the lot?
• What is a car worth?
• What is the most I can pay?
• What kind of vehicles do I have or do I not have that I need to replace?
• Where is the market going?

It’s evident that there are a lot of decisions that need to be made in such a fast-paced industry, and without the right tools that leverage the latest technological advancements, it’s hard to see the full picture of where things stand.

The Importance of a Smooth and Efficient Acquisition Process

Without having a smooth and efficient acquisition process in place, you won't know what works and what doesn't work. You’ll just constantly be throwing out ideas to see if they stick. With a standardized process, you can figure out what steps need to be improved over time. On the flip side, not having an acquisition process in place means you’ll never be able to refine your methods and scale your dealership. 

There are a few key factors when it comes to achieving a process you can be proud of. The first is having as much information as possible, readily available and at your fingertips. This will help you answer all the questions we’ve stated above. Increasing visibility into your operations will help you streamline and continuously improve your internal processes. Knowing information like how long you’ve had a vehicle and having a disciplined process for disposing of stale vehicles are valuable strategies to set in place. 

It’s also important to understand market trends when sourcing and acquiring vehicles. Knowing which makes and models are selling quickly in your area will help you know what you should be buying — and at what rate you can expect vehicles to sell. 

A baseless strategy isn’t going to get you the best results. Visibility into your operations and leveraging technology and automation to smooth out processes is what’s going to set your dealership ahead of the competition. There are thousands of dealerships out there, and you can bet that most of them are doing everything they can to stay ahead of the game and increase profits. Can your dealership say the same?

Choosing the Right Vehicle Acquisition Platform for Your Dealership

CarOffer streamlines and improves the vehicle acquisition processes in ways that directly benefit consumers and dealerships alike. It provides dealers with a real-time number on every single car that they put in their system. Through this solution, a dealer can immediately input a vehicle into the CarOffer system while the customer is there negotiating a trade. CarOffer will then provide them with a number in real-time and not a range, improving the trade-in process from both the consumer and dealer sides. 

Likewise, CarOffer provides options for when a customer is remote. If a customer reaches out to a dealer, they can input vehicle information into the system and get a number, giving them the ability to adjust it and make an offer that will provide them with an increased profit. On top of this, CarOffer also streamlines the process by giving dealers the ability to put a widget on their web page, completely powered by CarOffer so they can extend offers to consumers through their own website. After installing the widget, the dealer can either make an offer to the customer based on their own insights or offer them the same number that they would get through the CarOffer platform in real time.

CarOffer is quickly becoming an auction replacement platform because of the amount of inventory and vehicle supply available. For almost every make and model that gets bought and sold in the U.S., CarOffer has a dealer on the platform that has that kind of inventory in stock. This makes finding the types of vehicles that are selling well in your area a lot faster and easier.  

Another key feature of CarOffer is its automation. Dealers invest a lot of time into finding vehicle inventory. In many cases, this is done one car at a time. In a competitive auction environment, even if you find the vehicles you’re looking for, you still have to bid on them and win. Through CarOffer’s automated solutions, you can set parameters that allow you to automatically preview hundreds, if not thousands of cars a day to find the exact make and models you are looking for, all within minutes and without having to leave the dealership. With CarOffer’s Buying Matrix™, you tell us what kind of cars you want, how many you want, how much you want to pay, and the system does the rest. 

Whether you want CarOffer to run autonomously or you’d prefer to oversee the vehicles that the system matches you with, CarOffer allows you to leverage its system in whatever way works best for your dealership.

Expedite and Optimize Processes with CarOffer

The best dealerships find ways to shorten vehicle buying—selling—and trading timeframes, and are the ones that add value to the customer experience. These dealerships truly care about presenting their customers with the right car at the right time. It’s also key for dealerships to focus on reducing internal timelines, like those within the vehicle acquisition process. They need the fastest way possible to find the exact makes and models they are looking for and options that fit within their processes. 

CarOffer was crafted to simplify and improve how dealerships source, trade, and sell vehicles. It provides dealers with an easy, safe, and fast way to acquire the cars they want so they can always have the vehicles their customers are interested in on their lot. CarOffer removes the need to compete at auctions and be constantly spending valuable time looking for certain vehicles. Through our platform, you can automatically sift through inventory nationwide to acquire the right vehicles faster than through manual methods. 

The way that a customer is searching for the perfect car is directly related to that customer buying that car from your dealership…as long as you have it in stock. CarOffer gives you an expanded opportunity to have these cars readily available on your lots for the least amount of effort and time. It reduces frustrations that many dealers face on a daily basis and speeds up processes, like vehicle acquisitions, that are extremely timely and critical to maximizing dealership profit. 

For more information about how CarOffer streamlines dealer processes, like vehicle acquisition, reach out to our team and see a demo of the platform!