The Amazonification of Buying a New Car

Amazon is an aggregator or e-commerce that harmonizes the buyer experience across all manufacturers on its platform, and allows buyers to build a shopping cart of disparate items from many vendors, all with more of less the same terms and conditions. This article describes how OEMs are doing indeed going online, but doing so in quite the opposite approach, by each building their unique ecommerce distribution and shopping experiences.

Aside from my qualms with the article title, the content itself is anecdata at best.

I do think people are increasingly going to buy cars online, much like appliances and other large purchases they'll trade off physical inspection of the vehicle against viewing review videos and getting feedback from social networks, but because there's a whole segment of the population (gear-heads) that enjoys the shopping experience I think dealerships can still thrive, they may just need a much smaller footprint and staff that can entertain the car enthusiast clientele.