A Complete E-Commerce Website as Standard

In light of the COVID-19 Pandemic, E-Commerce and digital sales process features to become part of standard tier on Autoweb Design’s new dealer website platform at no extra cost – Also to be offered to non-website customers for the first time. Existing website customers will be upgraded free of charge

Autoweb Design have today announced a package of new online features they are ready to roll out to the automotive dealer industry in an effort to help both groups and independents transition to ‘the new normal’ in the smoothest way possible.

After the seismic shock that has been the pandemic induced lockdown of the UK, it is already quite clear that as the nation looks back to normality that the habits of consumers in all industries are going to change markedly in at least the short to medium term. Whilst e-commerce has long ago become a staple of our daily lives, the extent to which customers will look to conduct as much of their purchasing journey online is likely to increase. As an industry, what can we do to embrace this and ensure car purchasing customers can interact with individual dealers in a way they are happy and comfortable to do so?

Autoweb Design, one of the leading providers of automotive dealer websites in the UK have been working for a number of years on a brand new industry leading website platform that was due to launch in March. This platform was due to include a number of new features, to be offered as bolt ons to improve a dealer’s end to end e-commerce experience. In anticipation of what ‘the new normal’ will look like, their engineering and development teams have been working over the last few weeks to add functionality to these features and integrate them with the base platform. These new features are now ready to be rolled out as standard to all Autoweb Design website customers. These features, detailed below, are also available as stand alone bolt ons for non-Autoweb Design websites and in an effort to show solidarity with the wider industry, Autoweb have engineered these bolts ons so they can now be seamlessly integrated with third party websites without the need to be an Autoweb Design customer

The list of features includes:

– A customisable e-commerce solution that offers the possibility of a full end to end purchase journey or can be made bespoke to a dealer’s specific requirements to offer only certain elements of the purchase journey including online reservations.

– A video portal tool that will allow dealers to offer live tele-conferencing between their sales team and the customer including the ability to show live video of the vehicle or present pre-recorded video walk-throughs, presented by the salesperson as part of the live presentation. This feature is currently in beta testing and will be released in the coming weeks.

Martin Dew, Digital Solutions Director of Autoweb Design said, ‘As we step towards ‘the new normal’ it is clear already that the public will be looking to limit, where possible, in person interaction with brands and retailers in the near future. This includes the vehicle purchasing journey and it is imperative that we ensure our customers are braced for this by offering the options they need to continue to interact with their customers on the customer’s terms, more and more of which will be online. We also wanted to make sure these tools were made available beyond simply our customer base. It’s been inspiring to see how the industry has really pulled together over the last month and we wanted to offer our help as widely as possible and ensure that not being a customer of ours is not a barrier to implementing the solutions we can offer to embrace the fall out from this unprecedented period of change’

Any dealers that would like more information on the e-commerce solutions available should email enquiries@autoweb.co.uk for further details.