THE issue of motor retailers losing out on sales of warranties and other value added products (VAPs) from online car, van and motorcycle retailing may have been resolved.
iVendi said it is seeing very high levels of penetration from a new way of including VAPs within the digital customer journey, although cautions that these initial results are only being seen among a small sample of dealers.
Chief Executive James Tew said: “VAPs are an essential source of per vehicle profitability for many or most dealers but when sales move online, as during lockdown, the number of products sold plummets. This has been an issue for some years.
“Until now, VAPs have been presented in a fairly blunt way within most online customer journeys. You’ll click to buy a car, go through finance and a range of other steps, then come to a screen that offers you a warranty, by which point you are probably fatigued by the whole process and skip on to the end.
“What we have done instead is integrate the VAP into an overall proposition as part of our new Digital Deals product and the initial results have been very strong.”
The data that iVendi is using was provided with the help of leading warranty provider Warrantywise. Antony Diggins, Chief Technology Officer said: “We’re just looking at data from a few dealers here but the most successful saw overall warranty sales across the dealership grow by 84% while the second-placed recorded a 72% rise. These are substantial increases.
“For some time, we’ve been looking at ways of making it as easy as possible for dealers to integrate warranties into the online processes and this has become even more important during the pandemic with the growth in remote sales.
“Certainly, the initial suggestions are that the iVendi Digital Deal could be a real step forward in this area but we now want to look at more data over a greater length of time to gain a better understanding of what is happening.”
Digital Deals are part of iVendi’s TRANSACT product, which was launched in April, near the start of the pandemic, and has since been widely adopted by iVendi’s customer base.
Tew added: “The whole approach behind Digital Deals is that they allow a proposition to be created and sent to the potential buyer as the basis for an online negotiation designed to replicate the subtleties of an in-person dialogue.
“This means that VAPs are included from the outset as an integrated part of the dealer offering, whether that means warranties, GAP insurance, service plans, paint and fabric protection, or a range of other products.
“The overall Digital Deals concept is proving to be very successful. Since it was launched, it has been used by our dealers to generate total advances of £88m, resulting in sales of £114m, making a major contribution to their financial wellbeing during the coronavirus crisis.”
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