As the market for e-commerce rises, Asbury Automotive Group Inc. (NYSE: ABG) has launched a platform for customers to buy cars completely online.
Clicklane, an end-to-end, car-buying platform that offers new, used and certified pre-owned cars, aims to put the Duluth-based dealership giant on par with Carvana (NYSE: CVNA), the pioneer of used online car buying that launched in Atlanta in 2014 and is now headquartered in Phoenix, Ariz.
The Clicklane platform has been in the works for about four years, when Asbury started PushStart, which allowed customers to complete some documents online but not the whole car-buying experience.
It highlights a larger automotive industry trend as more customers prefer to shop online rather than spending hours in a dealership. In 2019, a Cox Automotive study found more people are making car-buying decisions online and only going into dealerships once they’re ready to make a purchase.
In February, Asbury worked with Gubagoo, a software startup that provides dealerships with tools for e-commerce sales, to develop Clicklane, which went live at the end of October.
“The retail automotive space in general is archaic as it relates to other industries, because it’s never come along from a technology standpoint,” said Asbury CEO David Hult. “Nowadays you can do everything else on your phone. You could buy a home on your phone but couldn’t purchase a car.”
The Clicklane platform includes features such as “penny perfect” trade-in values and loan payoffs, payment figures based on local taxes and fees, a loan marketplace and online signing with DocuSign, according to a release about the platform.
Asbury aims for its Clicklane platform to be more expansive than Carvana’s, calling the end-to-end buying experience its “first step,” CMO Miran Maric said. Clicklane will also be a hub for car owners to have details about each of their vehicles, such as updated information for service scheduling or collision history.
But Carvana is also boosting efforts to make its platform more viable in the pandemic era. The company already had a robust online marketplace but increased touchless delivery options, said Amy O’Hara, associate director of communications at Carvana.
"We had that momentum growing pre-pandemic,” O’Hara said. “When the pandemic hit, it accelerated the already growing interest in online car buying.”
Carvana placed a 12-story "car vending machine," the tallest of its 27 structures, in Atlanta last month. People can pick up cars purchased online at the all-glass tower, located on 16th Street and highly visible from the highway. In its third quarter, Carvana saw a 41% year-to-year revenue growth, according to a release.
Gubagoo, Asbury’s partner in Clicklane, launched in 2012 in Florida and has a goal to make dealerships competitive with Carvana, COO Ryan Osten said.
When the pandemic caused dealership showrooms to shut down, Osten said Gubagoo ramped up its software to include virtual meetings and help provide delivery options. Gubagoo software also includes live chat with dealership representatives and personalized offerings.
Osten said the company has had 260% more dealerships use its virtual car retailing platform since February and consistent year-to-year growth.
Clicklane was already in the pipeline before the pandemic, and Asbury saw its pickup and delivery services for cars boom in the spring, Maric said, showing that people had a growing interest in a more remote car-buying experience.
“We had more consumers online and browsing vehicles,” Maric said. “It just gave us more of a visibility into the fact that more and more consumers would like to transact in this nature.”
According to Asbury’s five-year plan, the company expects to add $5 billion of revenue through Clicklane by 2025.
