Vehicle Merchandising Tips for Your Dealer Specials Web Page

Vehicle merchandising is important — especially on your dealer specials web page. Most consumers like to save money, and car shoppers are no different. In fact, the dealer specials page is one of the top five most-visited pages on every dealership’s website.

However, car shoppers aren’t conducting “dealer specials” searches online just to find savings opportunities. They’re also seeking to eliminate dealerships from their shopping lists. In other words, your dealer specials page is an online proving ground, and the vehicle merchandising strategy you apply there is vital to ensuring your dealership makes the cut.

Showing a variety of vehicle offers on your dealer specials web page should be table stakes. After all, some car shoppers are enticed by low finance rates while others prefer cash incentives, etc. 

But even if you merchandise your dealer specials web page with a variety of offers, there’s still one thing car shoppers won’t know for sure — whether or not the vehicles offered there will fit their monthly budgets. 

At the same time, merchandising a monthly payment offer “starting at'' a low price raises the hackles on haggle-adverse car shoppers’ necks. So, what’s a dealer to do?

Follow These 3 Vehicle Merchandising Tips for Your Dealer Specials Web Page

Tip #1. Face it timing and accuracy matter.

If you get your dealer incentives and specials up on your website by the third of the month, you’re in good shape, right?! Wrong. If you wait until the third to update your site, you’ve already missed 10% of the shopping days for the month. Not to mention the fact that the specials page is one of the most visited on every dealership’s website.

Plus, how accurate are those specials? What happens when you sell the vehicles featured in them? Turns out dealer incentives and specials merchandising is hard work! 

This is a case where automation can save you precious time, money, and headache.

Tip #2. Automate vehicle merchandising on your dealer specials web page with Fuse Dynamic Payments.

Here’s the scoop on how dealer specials web page automation with Fuse Dynamic Payments works:

Configuration

You select the models, trim levels, and lender programs to feature. You can configure nearly every aspect of every offer — including the type, down payment, and markup — to ensure profitability on both the front and back end.

Optimization

Thanks to our integration with Market Scan®, Fuse Dynamic Payments’ advanced technology optimizes your configured offers into penny-perfect monthly payments based on inventory, pricing, rebates, incentives, rates, residuals, and other dealership-set parameters.

Updates

Every night, every vehicle in your dealership’s inventory gets scanned and cross-referenced against your configured offers to dynamically update your dealer specials web page with your best ad-compliant specials, pricing, and payments.

Bonus: If a lender makes a mid-month program change, your specials, pricing, and payments are updated automatically to maintain profitability and/or display more competitive offers.

Tip #3. Out-merchandise the competition.

Using Fuse Dynamic Payments to find an aggressive residual program from a non-captive lender, a Midwestern Toyota dealership was able to sell 102 Forerunners in a single month at full MSRP — plus backend markup — with a monthly payment $80 lower than the competition.

The low monthly payment caused a stir among the dealership’s customers as well as its competitors. In fact, the competition contacted the OEM directly to complain that the dealership was advertising vehicles below Toyota MAAP prices. (They couldn't figure out how the dealership could offer such a low monthly payment without an extreme discount.)

Of course, the dealership using Fuse Dynamic Payments had the last laugh. The vehicles were sold for MSRP. Fuse simply found the lender and the program that allowed the dealership to out-merchandise the competition.

How to Get Started

If customers aren’t seeing your best ad-compliant specials, pricing, and payments upfront online, they’re likely to look elsewhere. Automate vehicle merchandising on your dealer specials web page with Fuse Dynamic Payments to ensure you never lose a deal to the competition on the basis of cost again.

Bonus: Dealerships who use Fuse Dynamic Payments to merchandise their new vehicle specials web pages see car shoppers visit 2.7 additional pages and go on to convert at a 43% higher rate across the website when compared to users who do not view Dynamic Payments specials.

Request a demo of Fuse Dynamic Payments now to get started.