Car buying website, Buyacar, which is owned by the publisher of Evo and Auto Express magazines, Dennis Publishing, has revealed that punters in remote rural areas are the most likely to use their website.
The firm has released a heatmap of the UK that shows the largest number of enquiries per capita (NB:the pink/red/burgundy areas) coming from rural Wales, the north of Scotland and the Scottish islands.
Talking about the distribution of their business, Austin Collins, co-founder and Managing Director of BuyaCar said, “Because we aren’t delivering from a central location we were interested to see how far the typical delivery to a customer’s door was. When we found that the average distance is nearly 200 miles we looked to see how far flung our customers were – and that threw up some surprising facts about people who buy cars online.
“Naturally, in terms of raw numbers, most of our sales were in the big city areas where most people live. But when we compared our sales with population density it revealed that places like the Highlands and islands of Scotland are home to the keenest online car buyers.
“So, although we sell a lot of cars to people in London, Manchester and Birmingham we actually have a higher sales rate in many rural areas. This dispels for us any lingering myths that rural dwellers are slower than city types when it comes to adopting new ways of doing things.
Collins concludes by saying, “It also shows the importance of the internet to rural communities, for whom visiting lots of car dealerships is a much more time-consuming and expensive task. We also shouldn’t forget that this is a win-win from everyone too because online motor retail means dealers can now reach real customers who are too far away to spend time kicking tyres on the forecourt.”
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