Edmunds’ Buddy Lot App: Helpful to Consumers Or Pushing Away Salesmen?

Edmunds has developed a new update to their “Lot Buddy” app that some feel will allow customers to customize their buying experience. The app allows users to do research into particular vehicles on a given car lot. If the dealer has a relationship with Edmunds and has their inventory listed in their database, the customer can look up their desired vehicle and then give it a test drive.

The concept works like this: A customer walks onto a car lot and pulls out their phone. They look up the make and model of vehicle that they are searching for and then the comparisons begin. They can see editorial and user reviews and compare prices. The customers also have the chance to get what’s called a “no-haggle price.” That end result of customers finding a price and looking for a specific car fits well into the current mobile landscape. Seth Berkowitz, President of Edmunds said, “Mobile is increasingly the tool of choice for car shoppers. At present, mobile makes up 36 percent of all Edmunds.com traffic.”

For Edmunds, this app is all about helping customers do their own research and that often means finding out a lot of information before speaking to anyone at the dealership. Specifically customers want to know about prices. On this topic Berkowitz said, “We are paying close attention to shoppers, and we’ve found that the task done most often on the dealer lot is looking up pricing and using calculators in order to answer the question, ‘Is this a good deal?’ We are offering the easiest path to an answer.”

An editorial piece about this new app from Gizmodo mentioned the new Edmunds app allows consumers to, “search the dealership without invoking the sales sharks.” This raises the question of how dealers are responding to consumers who use the app on their lot? Are they changing their interaction with them at all? What if the customer wants to research cars without a car salesman for a few minutes? How will you handle that statement without turning off the customers to any sort of sale? How do you feel about consumers walking around your lot doing research on their phone? Is this new technology going to stick around or fade out?