Showroom Advantage - Features

Feature

Description

Advantage

Web Design

Our web designs are clean, professional, and importantly, simple. In an eCommerce web site, you want minimal emphasis on site branding (that's the job of advertising), and a maximum emphasis on product.

Take a close look at top eCommerce sites like BestBuy.com or Amazon.com, and you'll see what we mean.

Sadly, other firms designing web sites for car dealers are all about big show and little substance. They try to sell you an overly glitzy looking web site because they think they can impress you with it, and because they make more money producing a site with lots of Flash components. What they are doing is spending more of your money and delivering a web site that will sell fewer cars ... kind of a double whammy, huh?!?!

Click Here to read more about the Pros and Cons of Flash.

Site Content

Although marketing your inventory is the most important function of your web site, its nice to have other information in there too. So Showroom Advantage has a complete line up of content for Service, Parts, Business Information, Special Offers, F&I, Staff Identification, Maps and Directions, and more.

Various other vendors offer, collectively, all these informational web site components. However, it is rare to find one that has figured out the full slate of information that should be made available to your customers.

eCommerce Navigation

From the Showroom Advantage homepage, your customer can, with one click, instantly see a list of any New or Pre-Owned model in your inventory, a list of your specials, or a list of your featured vehicles.

By entering keywords in the Text Search box on your home page or any of the eCommerce pages, they can quickly see a list of the model and features they are most interested in.

Because of inexperience with both eCommerce design and efficient user interface design, the typical auto dealer web site makes customers navigate thru multiple sets of menus, and often make several choices from drop down selection boxes, before they ever see product!

Let me state this clearly and simply - If your web site works like that, it is costing you real money in lost sales.

Inventory Listings
(Multiple Vehicle Displays)

Whether your customer looks at a list of a particular model, or a list of your specials, they see a well organized display of the most useful information to interest them in the vehicles shown. They also see a good strong picture of the vehicle for sale.

In addition, we pull sales copy directly from the manufacture's web site to display with each applicable group of vehicles displayed.

No other auto dealer web site designer does an acceptable job with this important web site element. That's hard to believe, but its true.

If you don't bring a walk-in customer back to your office and make him pick a car from a green bar computer print-out, why in the world would you want to do that to him on your web site?

Inventory Listing (Single Vehicle Display)

Showroom Advantage displays up to 16 images of each vehicle (customizable for more views if needed), along with the important stats, manufacturer sales copy for the model (new vehicles), and your custom written sales copy for the particular vehicle on display.

This is one of the few areas where we don't blow everyone else away. We've seen quite a few dealer web sites that do a good job of single vehicle display.

Many, however, only display one image of the vehicle for sale, and it is rarely of the actual unit.

Text Search

Showroom Advantage has the only Google™ style text search available on auto dealer web sites.

No matter what combination of words your customer types in, no matter in what order, if you have a matching vehicle Showroom Advantage will find it and display it.

A correctly working Text Search feature is a required element of any professional eCommerce web site. In this day and age, you customer is used to making use of such a feature on every other eCommerce site they visit, and expect it to work on yours.

We've looked at literally hundreds of sites provided by dozens of vendors without finding even one that has a functional text search. This has become such an embarrassment to some vendors that they don't even try to include the feature in their web sites. Here's why theirs don't work - they are staffed solely by web developers who have little or no programming experience.

Providing a fully functional text search is not a difficult technical feat. Any good professional programmer can do it.
Think about that.

Featured Display

When entering your inventory, one click on a check box designates a vehicle to be included in a list of Featured Vehicles.

These are the first vehicles displayed when your customer looks at a list of either New or Pre-Owned inventory.

This allows you to give an extra push to inventory that is important to move, and helps you to sell units such as demos and loaners with amazing speed.

We have yet to see another vendor who includes this important feature in their auto dealer web sites.

On pretty much every other vendor's sites, the first display is a complete list of 100 or more vehicles in no particular order of value to any marketing effort. Your customers are not going to page thru a list that long looking for the one car that interests them, so that type of product display is a complete waste of your money and your customers' time.

Wish List - Favorites

The Wish List Feature allows your customers to 'flag' vehicles of interest as they come across them. Then, with one click, they can display this list of vehicles to peruse again. If you don't think this feature boosts sales, just ask Amazon.com.

This is another feature common to major eCommerce sites outside of your industry.

For some reason other auto dealer site developers just don't understand it and don't include it in their products.

Specials Display

By selecting a beginning and ending Sale Date when you enter a vehicle in your inventory, the vehicle is automatically displayed when your "Specials" link is clicked, When the ending date is reached, Showroom Advantage no longer displays the sale price.

Many other sites have such a display, although we are surprised that they do not all do this.

Many sites inexplicably use a 'static' specials display that must be updated by the web developer. Understandably, those pages are often out of date or empty.

Price Display

When your price for a vehicle is below MSRP (or average resale for pre-owned vehicles), we display both prices along with the difference beside a "You Save" label.

This is an important marketing feature that drives web site hits like crazy to vehicles so designated.

Amazingly, although you see this on almost every other type of eCommerce web site, it is rare to non-existent on auto dealer web sites.

This is another example that the ability to create HTML pages for a living does not in itself qualify an individual or company to create acceptable eCommerce sites.

Lead Tracking

Every contact generated by the web site is automatically saved to a contact management database to provide easy and comprehensive lead tracking.

Your lead tracking system is provided thru the Showroom Advantage administrative Control Panel.

This feature is found in offerings from some other vendors, but in general from some of the very highest priced solutions in the field.

The average vendor sends your leads to you, but provides nothing to help you track them through the sale.

Control Panel

Our administrative Control Panel provides the facility to enter inventory, set sale and featured vehicles, upload vehicle images, change your make and model navigation dynamically, work with lead tracking, and view our advanced statistical reports.

Obviously we have not seen the administrative 'backdoor' of many other vendors' offerings. They should be somewhat comparable in manner of use.

Our lead tracking, advanced reports, and dynamic navigation will not be found in many other systems though.

Advanced Statistical Reports

Showroom Advantage goes well beyond the normal web site stats to let you know exactly what your customers are looking at, how often, and for how long.

This information is critical to successfully analyzing how to optimize your internet marketing efforts.

In 'shopping' our competition, we have not yet found one that offers this level of advanced site tracking and reporting.

We would not be surprised to find it available somewhere else, particularly in some of the very expensive dealer solutions.



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