Chevy Pushes 24-Hour Online Buying Service

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Sep 15, 6:23AM EDT

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Chevy thinks it can sell more cars and light trucks if consumers can buy them 24 hours a day. Whether the nocturnal crowd can help boost sales is too early to tell. Or perhaps Chevy won’t disclose numbers about how the program is doing. Either way, General Motors Co. (NYSE: GM) has found a path to add sales that may trigger a change in how the industry operates.

The Chevy program is called “Shop. Click. Drive.” It is GM’s concession to the fact that people search the Web for car reviews, prices and feature details. The car review and vehicle comparison aspects of auto buying sites are missing from the GM brand’s e-commerce offering. Chevy does not have an incentive to help sell its competitor’s products.

Chevy’s website describes the service this way:

Introducing Shop. Click. Drive. The simple way to shop for a Chevrolet vehicle — anywhere, at any time of day or night. This easy-to-use online tool can help you find the latest incentives, estimate your trade-in value and monthly payments, even apply for credit — right on a participating dealer’s website. Then you can pick out accessories, purchase extended warranties and schedule delivery. Once you’ve completed the process, your vehicle is prepped and ready to drive home at your convenience.

The major non-cyber feature Chevy of the process is that buyers have to show up at dealers to pick up cars. It is too early for people to create their cars with a 3D printer, although new printing products show promise that the possibility may not be far away.

Chevy is betting that people will buy cars they may not seen in a dealership, if at all. Additionally, potential customers may not have driven them. Chevy has tried to overcome those potential drawbacks with plenty of videos of the vehicles it is selling. Another barrier to the system is that it estimates trade-in values. People have to go to dealers to get a final number, over which they may find themselves haggling, which could break-off the sales process.

Reading reviews, watching video, examining photos, comparing prices and collecting safety measures have disrupted the system in which dealers were the primary source of information. Chevy wants to get people to come back to dealers, if only to pick up cars they have already bought online.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.