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A NEW white paper from iVendi is designed to help dealers complete “digital transformations” that will make their businesses fit for the post-pandemic used car, van and motorcycle markets.

“Connected Retailing: Addressing the Challenges of Digital Transformation,” is available for anyone to download and covers a wide range of emerging trends and their potential technological solutions.

James Tew, Chief Executive at iVendi, said: “With the end of the pandemic now hopefully in sight, we’ve been spending considerable time examining how it has changed our understanding of the ways in which technology can best be used by dealers.

“Some of these are quite obvious and should be apparent to all dealers but others are relatively subtle. However, taken as a whole, we believe there has been something approaching a fundamental shift.”

There were four key points that really needed to be acknowledged, he added, and these were covered in detail in the white paper.

“Firstly, your systems must be able to handle any kind of buyer – whether they are digital only, traditional showroom purchasers or a hybrid buyer who uses a combination of both channels. Your dealership needs a digital infrastructure that can transition between each type and, crucially, offer the same level of service to all.

“Secondly, it has become increasingly clear that your physical and digital showroom are really one big sales floor, and this is what we call ‘connected retail.’ Especially bearing in mind that the majority of vehicle buyers fall into the hybrid category, there can be no artificial separation of the two. Your system needs to be flexible enough to accommodate everything from finance quotes and applications to part exchanges and outstanding finance – whether the buyer is online or standing in front of you.

“Next, you need to ensure profitability is maintained across the whole deal. Whenever pressure on vehicle margins increases – as we are seeing at the moment – it becomes crucial for dealers to maintain income in areas such as warranties and other value-added products. Historically, these have been difficult to integrate successfully into digital processes but considerable progress has been made in the last year.

“Finally, while most of the points in the white paper are universal across the industry, one development is very much centred on iVendi’s technology specifically. We believe that our Digital Deal product, introduced last year, provides dealers with the means to offer the best aspects of showroom and online sales journeys in a wholly digital format. It allows a complete proposition to be built for a specific customer in less than a minute and has now helped our dealers towards £92m of sales.”

“Connected Retailing: Address the Challenges of Digital Transformation” is available for download at https://ivendi.com/whitepaper.

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