Even when you purchase a used car, there are several dealer options that can be highly beneficial including vehicle protection plans (or extended warranties), GAP insurance, GPS services and more.
At DriveTime, we offer a vehicle protection plan to protect you from unexpected mechanical issues, SkyLINK GPS service to keep your car safe and GAP Insurance to protect your loan. Continue reading…
Are you confused about the process of purchasing a used car from a dealer or private party? Do you have credit or financing concerns? Don’t worry, you’re not alone.
Buying a used car can seem like a stressful experience, but this step by step used car buying guide will provide you with the tools needed to make an informed decision.
Buying a used car is an attractive option for drivers who want an economical and reliable vehicle, but don’t want to spend a fortune. Whether you have good credit, bad credit, or no credit, buying a used car provides a lower depreciation rate, lower payments, and a wide selection. In addition, purchasing a used car could help strengthen or repair your credit. Continue reading…
You’ve bought your car and you’re looking and feeling great, but now what do you do?
Given that this is most likely to be the second most expensive investment you make in your life, second only to a home purchase, it’s probably a good idea to take the necessary steps to keep it running for as long as possible. Today’s cars come with many advanced systems that monitor most of the cars major functions and alert you when there’s a potential problem, but with some basic knowledge, you can identify any potential problems even before the warning lights come on. Continue reading…
On February 13th, 2018, we announced the launch of our new mobile site with innovations designed to extend to both the customer experience and the technology we’ve employed
in launching the site.
– Improved and faster page navigation when customers are on our site (single-page application platform).
– Changes to content layout and imagery based on user behavior.
– Content tailored to the phone location (geolocation logic).
—Enhanced vehicle photos.
—New search filters to enable customers to find exactly what they are looking for in DriveTime’s new used car inventory, including the number of prior owners and accidents.
—Market price comparisons on thousands of used vehicles.
—Three-day guaranteed online pricing of customer trade-ins that’s being tested in select markets.
—Easy to find AutoCheck vehicle history reports on any of the 15,000 DriveTime used vehicles available nationwide.
—Streamlined contracting and e-signing
—Speed of financing online with a credit score and starting down payment in less than two minutes
—No haggle pricing, a no questions asked five-day used vehicle return program
—Salaried sales advisers at dealerships, focused on helping our customers find the right used vehicle for them from the thousands of used vehicles available
“There are a number of off the shelf mobile or website products offered by vendors to the new and used car industry. With over 1.2 million users each month on our desktop and mobile sites, we elected to custom develop our mobile site based on what customers are telling us they want — quick and easy access to the information they want to see, a customer experience game changer in used vehicle retailing,” said Scott Worthington, DriveTime’s vice president of retail marketing. “We’re just beginning to reimagine the entire vehicle retail experience,” Worthington added.
Don Irwin, director of IT, and Shawn Curran, managing director of retail and marketing product development, said, “With 125-plus IT employees at DriveTime, we have a large pool of IT expertise to draw on to review and execute exciting new technologies that allow us to truly enhance the customer experience within the used car industry. And, the mobile site was a key priority for our digital retailing initiatives. Because of our customer experience focus, load time and navigation performance were critical concerns during the development of the new site.
“It was also a lot of fun to dig further into SEO compatibility because of our unique approach with the single-page application platform,” they continued. “Our team also implemented a best in breed solution incrementally delivering data as required to make the used car shopping experience as fast as possible. We accomplished this using the Angular 4+ client-side framework and Node.js for the server build, and for data and other dependencies we were able to use bleeding edge technologies like Azure CosmosDB, Azure Search, Azure CDN, Redis Cache and Azure Service Bus,” Irwin and Curran went on to say.
“From an IT perspective, we had a blast with this project,” they added.
“To meet customer expectations and cut the time it takes to buy a car, dealers need to provide a “connected retail” experience”, said Mike Burgiss, Vice President of digital retailing at Cox Automotive, pictured below.
“That means dealers should provide technology and tools that allow consumers to start their vehicle purchases online and finish it in-store,” Burgiss said. “The whole process is seamless, and convenient and more efficient and more profitable.”
The DriveTime experience: Get your down payment online, shop online for vehicles quickly and easily with full vehicle details at your fingertips.
We just rolled out at all of our stores, fewer legal forms and a contracting video with e-signatures to provide complete transparency and put the customer in control of contracting.
We’ve also added 6,000 low mileage, competitively priced vehicles to our inventory. DriveTime is focused on both the “click” (online/mobile) and “brick” (store) experiences of our customers—we are truly connecting retailing.
Read more about what an industry leader is saying about connected retailing and the future of car buying.
Autoremarketing.com: Dealerships Must Change…
