Epidemic, "online car purchase" can become a car company's life-saving straw?

Author: Xie Tianshang

The sudden epidemic that kicked off the year 2020 has added insult to injury for many industries that were already in a poor state. Since the epidemic has not been fully suppressed, people have been forced to stay at home almost daily to avoid infection.

This has caused the catering, entertainment and retail industries to suffer heavy losses.

The automobile industry, which relies mainly on 4S stores and offline outlets for transactions and after-sales services, has not been immune to the impact.

So, almost all the major car companies have launched "online car", "online car" and other initiatives, through the live platform to see the car online/talk about the car, online car showroom VR to see the car, cross-border marketing and other ways to attract the attention of consumers. The consumer's attention.

Nowadays, if you open a major live broadcast platform or automobile website, you can almost always see the information of online marketing of automobile enterprises.

Through these "online car watching" to get the data of potential car buyers, and then send the car door to door test drive, online payment, door to door delivery of the car and other ways to complete the transaction.

"Online car shopping" seems incredibly safe and very much in line with mainstream consumer habits, so in the case of the epidemic, can online car shopping be a lifesaver for car companies? Or will there be a shift in the way cars are retailed?

The helplessness behind the fire

It is undeniable that automotive e-commerce is the future development trend of the auto sales industry, or the auto sales model, in the future there will certainly be a new way.

And the current "online service" is more like the car companies in the epidemic during the "emergency measures", seems to be behind the fire, in my opinion, but revealed a lot of helplessness, quite sick and desperate situation.

First of all, the so-called automotive e-commerce has been launched for several years. A few years ago, Ali, Jingdong, Suning and other mainstream e-commerce platforms have been to the 'automotive e-commerce', including countless automotive media e-commerce platforms, manufacturers of self-built e-commerce platforms, etc., but did not achieve good results, sales are far less than expected.

Including many of the new forces of the car-making enterprises, in the very beginning of the layout of online services, it seems that "online marketing" has become a new force of car companies want to highlight their own sense of technology and user thinking necessary factors.

But the fact is that most of the order transactions, or to return to the offline. Therefore, the "online car purchase" is not a new attempt, but a helpless move.

What is the difficulty of "online shopping"?

Today's young consumers have long been moving from offline to online, and online shopping has become the preferred option. But why does this not work when it comes to the automotive industry?

I think there are two main reasons. One is the distribution of benefits, compared with the traditional sales model, the development of automotive e-commerce difficulties in the distribution of benefits there are contradictions.

The traditional model, 4S stores are mostly operated in a franchise business model. Dealers through the investment in 4S stores for offline marketing, profits, sales sold more, the store's profits increased, the distribution of benefits is relatively simple.

But in the process of transitioning to online, the 4S store sales staff live online for users from all over the world, which ultimately makes the user interested in the model and contributes to the online order after the sales himself and the sales of the store does not have any benefits.

This means that the dealer's salespeople, who are broadcasting live on the Internet, are actually working directly for the OEMs, while the staffing costs are borne by the dealers themselves, and the profit sharing skips the dealers.

And the OEMs don't have a good solution to this problem, after all, there's no way to force all the users placing online orders to fill in which live streaming room they saw the car.

So the conflict of interest between traditional OEMs and dealers is a major contradiction in the transformation of automotive retailing methods.

Of course, new power car makers such as Azure and Xiaopeng, which operate more in a direct mode, will find it easier to face the problem of benefit distribution.

On the other hand, the car itself is a special product.

For most consumers, the online car buying platform is just to see what the car looks like, just by watching the live broadcast will be chopping down the number of people ordering a car is not much, from watching the live broadcast of the purchase intention to realize the real purchase offline seems to have a huge gap.

In fact, this time the auto industry collective "online office", the main reason is still the impact of the epidemic. After the end of the epidemic, it will return to the traditional offline transaction-based model.

But this large-scale, collective online marketing, but also let us for the automotive marketing model change has a new thinking. As China's auto market enters an era of negative growth, and as the main consumer gradually becomes younger, marketing transformation is bound to happen sooner or later, even if no epidemic emerges.

In my opinion at this stage of online marketing, before the formation of an extremely perfect system, does not necessarily have to hold the purpose of converting sales. Selling a car by looking at the anchor's face is really paying the IQ tax.

The diversion and acquisition of sales leads is more important, in the era of big data, advertising or content placement considerations should be changed from simple breadth to depth, mastering the leads is more important than taking for granted the conversion of sales.END

This article comes from the author of the automotive home car family, not on behalf of the views of the automotive home position.