It’s well-documented that consumers despise car-shopping. They feel outgunned by sales people and hate wasting time in showrooms. 
Include me among them. I avoid car showrooms like the plague even though I am occasionally tempted to test drive this or that model when I see dealer signs looming above the roadway. I keep right on driving. The last time I stopped at a dealer, an inexperienced sales person wasted more than an hour of my time through the dinner hour getting to know me, i.e. taking down information so he could hound me until I bought something or just stopped responding.
GM’s eBay experiment would seem to level the playing field a bit, allowing customers (California only for now) to negotiate online instead of face to face with the adversary. The eBay GM interface is Google simple and suggests a less painless interaction, save paying for the new vehicle.
Anything that lowers time in the showroom is a good thing. However, the dealer still looms large when buying new GM models through eBay Motors. The dealer negotiates, does the paperwork, obtains credit and most of the other particulars involved in buying a new vehicle.
GM’s experiment - eBay calls it a “promotion” suggesting the program could be temporary - will be closely watched by automakers, dealers and consumers alike. Will consumers get better deals online than buying in person? Will dealers renege on online deals and try to up sell consumers once they are lured into the showroom? Will the particulars of the deal be evident before the consumer sets foot in the showroom? At what point can consumers back out of a deal? Didn’t some dealers already haggle with consumers online? Where does the test drive fit in? No one should buy a vehicle without a test drive.
The good news is consumers have the upper hand given the horrible car sales for the past year. Let’s hope the GM eBay car store deal is truly beneficial instead of online window-dressing for the usual stress-laden relationship between customer and dealer.
And remember “dis-intermediation”? Popular during the Internet boom of the late nineties, the term like it sounds implies the elimination of the middle man (lose the intermediary). The Internet would obsolesce distributors, dealers and even retailers. We’d just happily buy everything online from the manufacturer.
Of course it only happened a little with the emergence of eBay, Amazon and online retailers which are middle men in their own right. And it didn’t happen at all with new car sales. But if you like me think that Amazon and eBay over the years have produced better deals for consumers, there’s reason to be optimistic about the GM-eBay Motors arrangement.
For now, the dealer remains the wild card. Should dealers go away entirely and focus solely on sales support and vehicle maintenance? Maybe, that’s the next model.
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