Coming soon, General Motors will be building their car dashboards a bit differently — with eCommerce capability built right into the dashboard. GM is betting that given a choice, drivers would rather find fuel, buy food or reserve lodging with a dashboard tap — as opposed to scanning through their phones while behind the wheel.
The new tech was developed cooperatively with IBM and will be uploaded to any post-2017 GM car, starting now. That accounts for about four million Chevrolets, Buicks, GMCs and Cadillacs that will now have the capability to literally shop on the go here in the U.S.
Marketplace merchants will kick GM back an undisclosed amount of revenue for placement in the in-dash marketplace. Consumers will face no charge for making use of the service in terms of data transmission.
“This platform is financed by the merchants,” Santiago Chamorro, GM’s vice president for global connectedness, said. GM will get paid for placing a merchant’s application on its screens, and “there’s some level of revenue sharing” based on each transaction.
It remains to be seen how much revenue this brings in.
It also remains to be seen how interested customers are in using this, as opposed to the universe of commerce applications that already live in their phones. And at first, the vendor count for the GM Marketplace will be low.
“We will be adding more vendors,” with some coming in the first quarter of 2018, Chamorro said. He also noted that GM plans to expand integration into its vehicles in the future, adding music, news and other information services. GM further noted that its eventual hope is to leverage Marketplace to aid drivers in their purchases of goods and services like access to in-car wifi.
Customers should “expect to see more service promotions coming through the platform,” Chamorro said.
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