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When GM tried to sell cars via eBay, 45 cars were sold in the first nine days. A month later, the idea was abandoned. Is the idea dead? Not in China.
China’s Geely started selling cars on-line a few weeks ago. Not on eBay, but on Taobao. Taobao, owned by Alibaba, is China’s leading e-commerce website. As of Thursday, December 23rd, Geely already had moved 500 cars on-line, Gasgoo writes, citing a report of the official Xinhua News Agency.
The number of internet users in China is 420 million, a penetration of 31.6 percent. Most of them are car-less …
8 Comments on “Geely Beats GM – In On-Line Sales...”
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I don’t know why this can’t work world-wide; everything else is sold that way. Auto dealer experience is so dismal for most people, this seems to be a natural. Some version of the dealership is necessary for demonstration and repair I guess. I’d love to see this concept take-off in a significant way.
I wish it were that way, too…but dealers still have too much power in the supply chain. On top of that, there are still plenty of customers out there who really enjoy finding something sub-optimal out of existing inventory and then getting a thousand or two discount on it.
SMART and Saturn have come the closest to ideal in the past, but one business model was basically abandoned and the other went out of business.
Two problems with internet sales.
Finance and trade-in. Especially trade-in is problematic
@charly
I completely forgot about trade-ins…barring the tiny tax benefit, I’d love to see a more robust private market take the place of dealer trades. Despite Craigslist and ebay (etc), lots and lots of people still enjoy the simplicity of a trade-in.
Wish the housing market were more like that…
Homes are sold locally, cars are often exported and homes don’t lose their value like cars do
ps. I wouldn’t be surprised if in the case of homes it is more often true that the “trade-in” is the objective of the sale and not the new home
” Some version of the dealership is necessary for demonstration and repair I guess” You guess? The right relationship with the right dealership is the most important part of buying a car.
Completely disagree. Every after the sale dealership experience that I have had has been a, “Who are you and what do you want?” One jerk-off actually called me six months later and wanted to know if I wanted to buy a new car, I told the dumb-a$$, “I just did”, so he says, “You want to trade for a new one?” Some “right” relationship!
Makes complete sense to me. After all, if you actually test-drove that Geely… ;D