DealerOn, which provides digital marketing solutions for car dealers, launched a new website platform on Wednesday (March 9) intended to make it easier for car dealers to instantly showcase monthly payments for users visiting their sites.
According to the press release, the new platform, called Cosmos, offers an agnostic digital retailing experience called “open retailing.”
“Connecting manufacturer data with the dealer’s website, Cosmos automates all of a dealer’s critical online dealership functions,” said DealerOn CEO Ali Amirrezvani. “It creates and syncs vehicle specials, update business profiles, offers, citations, generates digital creative content and landing pages, without the need for expensive third-party add-ons or agencies.”
Cosmos was rolled out in beta in late 2020 and is now being introduced in hundreds of dealerships, per the release.
PYMNTS wrote that car dealers have had to make changes in the current environment, given that there aren’t many used vehicles available. As such, they’ve had to begin looking at vehicles they don’t know as well and may not have thought about buying before.
Read more: Car Dealers Use Data to Optimize Buying and Selling in Today’s Volatile Market
This has added more challenges, as in order to make a profit, these dealers have to be able to identify a car down to the trim level, know its history and know the value a bank could approve a loan for. Businesses also have to be up to date on the values for trade-in, wholesale and retail values.
“As a dealer in the trade, when you’re looking at that and you’re thinking about what you should really sell this thing for, you’re trying to make sure you don’t give it away but you don’t want to sit on it and not turn the car,” Rory MacGregor, head of sales and marketing for Carbly, told PYMNTS.
Carbly offers digital tools to help make those decisions, including a vehicle identification number (VIN) scanner that gives a detailed view of the facts about the vehicle. There’s also a platform that brings together data sources which the dealer subscribes to, like history and pricing data.