London’s CarSpring Offers Online Car Marketplace With Home Delivery

CarSpring is a new service in London, England that aims to simplify the car buying experience by providing an online used car marketplace with delivery to the customer’s doorstep.

Several other similar companies have emerged in recent years, including Beepi, Carvana and Tred, and the concept is making waves throughout the auto industry as these new companies are trying to cut dealerships out of the car business.

“A previously owned car delivered right to your doorstep. That’s the service CarSpring, which launched today in London, provides for their customers,” reads the company’s description. “The new online marketplace acts as a matchmaker of sellers and buyers of pre-owned vehicles. The company’s aim is to take overall the unpopular side effects of car buying – from paperwork to transportation. CarSpring is currently available in London and surrounding areas.”

How does the service work?

Owners enter their cars’ license plate number on the company’s website, and will subsequently be provided with a quote. If the seller is satisfied with the quote, they can directly make a booking for their vehicle to be inspected by the company. Once the car has successfully gone through CarSpring’s 200-point inspection, the company will list the car on its website to find a match between the seller and a buyer. After a sale has been made, the vehicle will be delivered to the customer’s doorstep. Because a test drive won’t have been possible, the buyer has 14 days to try out the car. If they aren’t happy with the purchase, CarSpring will pick it up at no additional charge.

“Buying and selling a car can be a tremendous effort in terms of research and purchase,” explains Maximilian Vollenbroich, CarSpring’s co-founder. “The selection on the market is huge and not everybody is honest about the facts. We want to provide a solution to a trusted, safe, convenient and full-service package.”

In the past, we’ve talked a lot about the need for dealerships to improve the customer experience to meet the expectations of consumers. Companies like CarSpring are attempting to capitalize on the sometimes negative perceptions of buying a car from a dealership, and it’s important for dealers to recognize the value in offering superior customer service to give consumers a continued reason to prefer them to an online alternative.

“The used car market is very peculiar and not very transparent to the general public,” said Vollenbroich. “Selling or buying your car can be quite a hassle: time consuming research for the right model and the best offer, sleazy salesmen, the fear of buying a lemon. With CarSpring, we want to change all this and make buying and selling a car easy and convenient for everyone. CarSpring is a modern online marketplace where buyers and sellers can deal their cars the easy way. In general, we see ourselves as matchmakers between sellers and buyers of used cars – not salespeople.”

Although the perception that Vollenbroich describes is shared by some, there are certainly other consumers who greatly value the expertise that comes from a salesperson at a dealership, which cannot necessarily be provided by an online marketplace in a direct manner. Discussing a purchase face-to-face offers a very different type of sales environment, and if dealers can provide an exceptional customer experience, the perception of their value can be heightened.

However, services like CarSpring feel that they can be more effective than dealerships. “Having had a few rather unpleasant encounters when buying my first cars and also knowing the industry quite well from my time as a management consultant at McKinsey in which I also did a research project on the future of automotive retail, I am convinced that there must be a better and more efficient way of buying and selling cars, especially used ones,” said Vollenbroich.

The growing number of online car marketplaces is yet another reason for dealerships to customize their sales approach to deliver superior customer service in the ever-changing commercial landscape, to ensure that they are providing value that cannot be matched online.

Do you think that CarSpring poses a threat to traditional auto dealers?