I heard a story about a year ago of someone making a site online to see if this was viable. People ordered cars, and they would get them from the dealership and truck them to the house.
It wasn't a scalable implementation, but they were just trying to determine if a market even existed -- and it did.
I would imagine it's a huge market. Just imagine it- you go to a website, pick out a car you actually want, customize the features there, and then get an actual price. Now compare that to going to a dealer, selecting from what they have, and haggling over the price. Buying cars now is a painful experience.
It really isn't that bad if you're in an area with a few dealers. Call each and say "This is what I want, this is the price I know it can be sold at. I don't have time for other options, and if you try to sell me any or haggle on price I'll go somewhere else. When can you have this model with these options available for me to come pickup?" Took me five dealers and I had to drive 45 minutes to get the car from the non-asshole dealer. Easy!
> Took me five dealers and I had to drive 45 minutes to get the car
That's not bad when you compare it to car sales in the past, but really, it's far from optimal. If you read just what I quoted and replace "car" with any other product I'd say it's kind of ridiculous unless the product you're looking for has very specific options and is out of production.
Not that ridiculous. Too often, I'm faced in a shop with a choice between a large doohickey and a small doohickey and I really want a medium doohickey, and have to drive/phone/search a lot for it.
Laptops. So many different models, impossible to fine tune for on anywhere except Newegg, but their laptop prices are surprisingly high and you can't find the same model at BestBuy
My last car buying experience was easy. I just called dealerships and told them what I was buying and when and had them bid against each other for my business.
Ended up getting a great price below invoice and only had to call six dealerships and visit one.
I can't imagine an online only dealership being able to compete on cost.
I don't believe the delivery cost was passed to the customer.
They also needed to send someone physically to the dealership to negotiate and get the vehicle. And get a truck there to drive the car where it was going. These costs aren't negligible and would need to be passed to the customer. I think the key one is actually going to the dealership to negotiate and get the vehicle.
Understood. They may have done well to bring a car broker onto their team who understood the market, and already had relationships with dealers in order to shortcut through these issues.
It wasn't a scalable implementation, but they were just trying to determine if a market even existed -- and it did.