Most customers go online before buying.
Turners Auctions is hoping a revamp of its online presence into a one-stop shop for car buyers will translate into more sales as it looks to overcome sluggish market conditions.
The company has been redesigning its website, turners.co.nz, to provide more comprehensive data on each vehicle
in its catalogue, incorporating information such as price checks, safety features, financing costs and fuel economy.
The new-look website, to be launched later this month, follows upgrades to its Turners Live web auction facility late last month.
Chief executive Graham Roberts said the move had been prompted by a massive growth in new visitors to the site. Last year, the unique visitor numbers jumped 55 per cent to 976,000. The percentage of cars the company sold via the web has also gone from zero to 18 per cent in the 18 months to December.
Roberts said the company's own research also showed that 85 per cent of its customers went online before making a purchase.
"The old days of going out and driving around the car yards trying to find a car, it's just all gone."
He said most car buyers had already done their research before they even stepped outside their front door, so the idea behind the revamped website was to get as much information as possible in one place for time-starved customers.
But it faces an uphill task upstaging Trade Me. The online auction house's motoring section garnered more than 500,000 visitors in the latest Nielsen/NetRatings results for the week to April 13, compared with Turners' 24,515.
Roberts, however, said the new website was not intended to go head-to-head with the competition.
"I don't see us necessarily competing, we do overlap obviously. We also use Trade Me because it's a good place to list cars and find customers, and that's why 85 per cent of the dealers are there."
The used car market is facing an oversupply with a glut of vehicles brought in late last year to beat stricter exhaust emissions requirements introduced this year. The wider economic climate has also seen dealer sales slump 20 per cent in the year to March.
