Extend your geographical reach and open up new audiences and sales opportunities
By Karolina Edwards-Smajda, Commercial Product Director, Auto Trader.
In this blog post I will outline a new proposition from Auto Trader, for our retailer partners to extend their geographical reach with new home delivery and click and collect solutions launching over the coming months and provide information about tests we’ll be conducting soon with buyers on Auto Trader.
Why we exist
Our company mission is to lead the digital future of our industry, helping retailers make more profit, improving the buying experience and removing inefficiencies through technology. One of the building blocks on this mission is at the intersection of new emerging consumer trends for online shopping which is leading many retailers to consider how they adapt to this change, accelerating plans we were developing to enable this shift for our retail partners. As consumer behaviour moves increasingly online, in part prompted by COVID-19, we want to make a buyer’s experience on Auto Trader as seamless as possible and create efficient solutions for retailers that in turn open up new opportunities. Many buyers still want to shop locally and visit their local dealership, which we already enable through our platform and will further enhance with our new Top Spot offering. However, there are an increasing number of buyers who would give equal consideration to a vehicle located further afield, if it can be easily accessible to them. It all comes back to connecting the right vehicle and seller to the right buyer as efficiently as possible.
Online retailing has long set the bar for seamless retailing, taking John Lewis as an example, when shopping online, buyers are presented with simple options for the item to be collected in store, delivered for collection from a store near them if out of stock locally, or delivered to their home. This is a model that we aim to bring to our platform, presenting buyers with more relevant stock and enabling our retailer partners to extend their sales reach beyond their physical locations and remove the need for this stock to be tied to one location, opening up new sales opportunities and new buyer markets for that stock.
Market Extension – modern retailing with no boundaries
Our new Market Extension offering, which is being tested now, is our solution to these modern retail challenges and consumer expectations being driven by other industries. We have already introduced home delivery flags, free for retailers to display on their adverts where they can offer home delivery. This means that when a buyer views that advert, they will know if they can have the vehicle delivered to them. This is restricted to vehicles located at a specific site and, given buyer search behaviour often favours more local searches, doesn’t help retailers extend their geographical reach. You can think of this as an organic home delivery solution, allowing retailers to advertise the home delivery service they offer to buyers already looking at their adverts.
Our new Market Extension solution enables retailers’ stock to appear in a search outside of their normal local market; extending their sales reach to new audiences and creating new sales opportunities, without the need for new locations or the need to repatriate stock across a group. The product has two different but complementary options:
Market Extension – Home Delivery and Click & Collect
The home delivery component will enable retailers to specify postcode areas they are willing to deliver to and their stock then appears in search to buyers in those areas, clearly marked as being available for home delivery. Click and Collect makes their stock appear available at any of their sites nationally, again making it clear to a buyer that the vehicle is located at another site in the group but can be moved to their local site. Market Extension vehicles will not currently appear if a buyer conducts a hyper local search to ensure we’re best serving buyer needs as well as retailers.
Testing buyer demand and product functionality
This is new functionality for our site, and a relatively new customer need, so we want to ensure we test this fully with consumers and our retail partners prior to full launch. We have over 3,000 retailers who have added Home Delivery as a flag on their adverts and we’re keen to explore further the consumer appetite for seeing vehicles that offer home delivery as well as those who want to exclude home delivery as an option and focus on local physical search. We’re currently trialling our home delivery offering with a limited number of retail partners, so we are introducing some search filters to a 5% sample of buyers on Auto Trader to learn how they interact with this stock and how it works for our retailer partners on the trial. We are aiming to test consumer demand on our site for home delivery stock, balanced with interaction with filters which allow them to only see vehicles which they can view locally to them. This test will be live for a period of two weeks.
Click and Collect is going through final internal testing and will be made available for retailers in the coming months. Your Account Manager can give you more information on both offerings.
Update from our testing: We have run the above test and reviewed the findings. There has been little interaction from consumers with the current test on home delivery so we’ll continue to explore further executions of it over the coming weeks. We’re likely to include click & collect options into the next test once that functionality is ready. As we learn more about what car buyers are looking for we’ll continue to share our findings and ongoing product changes.
FAQs on our home delivery filter testing
Why do we want to introduce this filter?
Consumers are becoming more interested in the idea of Home Delivery and the recent lockdowns mean the appetite for car purchases without a forecourt may have accelerated. We have a number of retailers who have added Home Delivery as a flag on their adverts and we’re keen to explore further the consumer appetite for seeing vehicles that offer home delivery as well as those who want to exclude home delivery as an option and focus on local physical search. It’s important that we continue to review ways that we can make the consumer journey easier and allow choice for consumers on what they search for.
How many retailers currently offer home delivery on Auto Trader?
Over 3000 retailers currently display the Home Delivery flag, this equates to 160,000 items of stock. If you offer Home Delivery and haven’t yet updated your details on Auto Trader you can find out more here.
Have we seen any behaviour that would suggest home delivery is generating more response for retailers?
This is part of what we’d like to understand as a result of the test.
I don’t offer home delivery – will I get less response now. I’ll be excluded from search when I could have converted that consumer?
You will continue to appear in default search, so it’s unlikely that you will see impact on your response. The test is to 5% of consumers, this will allow us to understand what consumers are looking for without impacting any response. We’re testing the impact of consumers including and excluding home delivery options from their search.
What % of consumers will see the toggle?
The initial test is to 5% of consumers & will run for less than 2 weeks. At the end of this period the filter will be removed, and we’ll review the findings.
What happens if consumer doesn’t do anything/what is the default
The default is that all stock that meets the search criteria is displayed regardless of home delivery options. If you are on the Market Extension Home Delivery product you will continue to appear in all relevant searches excluding the protection of local searches radius. So essentially nothing changes if the consumer does not specifically make a choice using the filter.
Will you charge extra to have the Home Delivery flag or to appear in Home Delivery search?
We don’t charge for the Home Delivery flag you can update this information at any time in portal and this would ensure you appear in relevant searches that select the Home Delivery only filter.
I offer free local delivery and I want to highlight this to my customers?
We would encourage all retailers to update the details that appear on their FPA including any delivery charges or calling out that delivery in a certain radius or area is free. You can find out more here.
I’m currently on Market Extension and paying a premium for this product, it looks like you are now allowing all retailers to offer home delivery – why should I pay a premium?
Market Extension still allows you the unique opportunity to extend your market reach anywhere in the UK in our default search. Other retailers who have flagged that they offer home delivery will only appear in searches as they do today based on their physical location, with delivery shown as an option in their advert view only.
We’ve been here before where Auto Trader have excluded us from search with chargeable products such as finance impacting our response, is this another one of those?
We don’t charge for the Home Delivery flag you can update this information at any time in portal and this would ensure you appear in relevant searches that select the Home Delivery only filter. It’s important that consumers are able to choose the options available to them in search. They may only be able to buy a vehicle that offers home delivery or they may wish to only see vehicles that they can buy from a forecourt. This test allows us to understand what consumers are looking for. The test is running to 5% of audience for less than two weeks, we will review all the learnings from the test alongside more qualitative data from consumer research and may run further tests to fully understand the right next steps. We will continue to share with our retailers as we progress with this. If you would like to be part of our Future’s group, a small group of retailers who would like to be involved in early testing and idea exploration for new products or features we are working on, you can sign up here.