TrueCar Partners With Sam’s Club For Auto Sales Program

TrueCar is teaming up with Sam’s Club. The warehouse arm of Wal-Mart will be offering its members access to the TrueCar online consumer database. According to the Sam’s Club website, its members will have access to the inventory at over 10,000 dealerships, which according to Sam’s Club is three times more than its nearest warehouse club channel rival. The program is said to offer guaranteed member savings on new and used vehicle purchases.

“Our auto buying program will save members both time and money,” Seong Ohm, senior vice president of merchandise business services at Sam’s Club said in a statement.” The process of purchasing a vehicle can be a daunting task. We’ve chosen to launch our auto buying program with TrueCar based on their proven ability to bring car buyers a best-in-class experience.”

Jim Nguyen, TrueCar’s co-founder and executive vice president of partner development, spoke about the partnership in a statement. Nguyen explained, “TrueCar and our dealer partners have helped modern consumers save over $3 billion off MSRP and are delighted to provide the best and most innovative car-buying experience to Sam’s Club members.”

Sam’s Club joins Costco in the warehouse club channel as offering auto discounts to its members and leads to local dealers. As we reported previously, in the case of Costco, the organization teams up with one dealership per brand in their area and sends its members to that store. In 2014, the Costco auto sales program was responsible for nearly 400,000 auto sales and has been around since 1989. For perspective on those stats, AutoNation, the largest dealer group in the country sold 533,000 vehicles last year.

The partnership with Sam’s club comes weeks after TrueCar founder and CEO Scott Painter decided to retire at the end of the year, and a few months removed from TrueCar and AutoNation ending their business relationship.

Do you think that this TrueCar-Sam’s Club Partnership will prove valuable for TrueCar? As was the case with Costco, Sam’s Club sees this partnership as a member benefit, not a profit driver. Costco’s program led to nearly 400,000 sales in 2014 … Do you think that the Sam’s Club Auto Buying program will be as successful as similar program at Costco?