It is twenty past ten on a Thursday night. A buyer has been looking at your Golf for three evenings running. They have read every line of the advert, zoomed in on the tyres, worked out the monthly figure in their head, and tonight they have decided. They want it. Whether they can have it tonight depends on whether your website has Buy Online.
So what do they do?
On most dealer websites, they fill in an enquiry form and go to bed. Tomorrow morning you ring them back, get their voicemail, and send a text. By lunchtime they have seen a similar Golf somewhere else, and the other dealer let them put a deposit down at eleven o'clock last night.
The buyer was ready. Your website was not.
Buy online is our answer to that. From the car page, a buyer works through one checkout, step by step, and finishes by paying a deposit that secures the car there and then. No phone tag, no waiting for the showroom to open.
One checkout, from car page to deposit
The checkout covers the decisions a buyer would otherwise make over three phone calls and a visit. Every step uses your own prices, products and settings.
Cash or finance. They pay cash, or choose finance quoted with the finance calculator on your website.
Part-exchange. They enter the car they want to part-exchange. You confirm its value once you have seen it, so nobody is committed to a number based on a description typed at midnight.
Extras. They add any of your own products and extras to the order, at your prices. Paint protection, a warranty upgrade, whatever you already sell across the desk.
Collection or delivery. They collect from the dealership, or choose home delivery within the radius you set, for the delivery charge you set.
Handover date. They pick a date, and it can be no sooner than the lead time you have chosen. That gives you the time you need to prepare the car properly.
Deposit. They pay a deposit through your card payment provider, and the car is reserved as soon as it is paid.
That last point is the one that matters. Reserved means reserved. Other buyers see it as spoken for, and the one who wanted it at twenty past ten on a Thursday has it.
What the buyer gets afterwards
Once the deposit is paid, the buyer is emailed an order confirmation with the full price breakdown: the car, the extras, the delivery charge and the deposit paid, with the part-exchange marked as to be confirmed until you have seen it.
It means everyone knows what has been agreed and what is left to pay. No "I thought the delivery was included" conversation on handover day.
The confirmation also includes the statutory 14-day right-to-cancel information for distance sales, under the UK Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013. A car sold through an online checkout is a distance sale, and the buyer is told their cancellation rights in writing as part of the order.
The buyer does not pay the full price online. The deposit secures the car, and you arrange the balance with them before handover, by pay link or bank transfer.
If you have the customer portal switched on, a car reserved online appears in the buyer's "My garage" straight away, so they can follow the order from there rather than ringing to ask where it is up to.
What lands on your desk
This is where a lot of "buy online" buttons fall down. The buyer has a lovely experience, and the dealer gets an email with half the details in it and a job to retype the lot.
Here, each checkout arrives in the Vehiso DMS as a normal order, flagged as sold online. Your team picks it up exactly the same way as any other deal.
The buyer's details. Their details and delivery address are on the order.
The money side. The finance quote and the part-exchange are noted for your team, so whoever picks it up in the morning knows what the buyer chose without phoning them to ask.
The handover date. The date the buyer picked is on the order, inside the lead time you set.
The cancellation window. Vehiso tracks when each buyer's cancellation window ends, and restarts it from the actual handover date. If the handover moves, the window moves with it, and you are not left working it out from an email thread.
You set the rules
Buy online is switched on in Settings > Payments. That is also where you decide how it works for your business.
Your payment provider. Deposits are taken through your own card payment provider: Stripe, PayPal, Square or Blink. The money goes to your account, not ours.
Delivery radius and charge. Offer collection from the dealership, and home delivery within a radius you set in miles, for a charge you choose. If you do not want to deliver to the other end of the country, the checkout will not offer it.
Minimum lead time. Set how much notice you need. Buyers can only pick a handover date that leaves you time to prep, valet and paperwork the car.
Your extras. Offer your own products in the checkout, at your prices.
Every website template. Buy online works on every Vehiso website template, so there is nothing to redesign and no page to rebuild.
The balance, your way. You arrange the balance before handover, by pay link or bank transfer, however you already prefer to do it.
If you want the supporting pages to go with it, our page templates include ready-made How to Buy, Part Exchange and Delivery and Collection pages you can add in one click.
Why it is worth doing
Buyers can go ahead at any time of day, even when you are closed. That is really the whole case.
A lot of used car buying happens in the evening, on a phone, on the sofa. The buyer who has made up their mind at that point has two options on most dealer sites: send an enquiry and hope, or keep looking. Every hour between "I want it" and "it is mine" is an hour in which they can find something else.
A deposit closes that gap. It also sorts the serious buyers from the browsers, which saves your sales team a fair bit of chasing. We wrote more on that side of it in accepting online deposits on your dealer website.
A few honest limits
The checkout secures the car. It does not complete the sale on its own. You still confirm the part-exchange value once you have seen the car, and you still arrange the balance with the buyer before handover. Those are deliberate: nobody should be locked into a part-exchange price for a car you have never looked at.
The 14-day cancellation information is included in the confirmation, and the window is tracked for you. That is the information and the tracking. It is not legal advice, and if you have questions about how distance selling rules apply to your business, speak to your own adviser.
Finance in the checkout is quoted with the finance calculator on your website. A quote is noted on the order for your team; it is not a lender's decision.
And the deposit needs a payment provider connected. Without one, there is nothing to take the deposit through.
Which plan it is on
Buy online is included on every paid plan, from £49 a month, and works on every website template. It is not on the Free plan.
The deposit is taken through the card payment provider you connect (Stripe, PayPal, Square or Blink), so you will need an account with one of them. PayPal and the other providers charge their own standard fees. You can try a paid plan free for seven days, no credit card required, and see the whole flow end to end before you commit.
If you are losing late-night buyers to whoever answers first, this is the fix. See how it works on the buy online feature page, or check the pricing to see which plan suits you.
More from the Vehiso blog
- Introducing the Customer Portal: My garage for every buyer
- PayPal for car dealers: take deposits with the checkout buyers already trust
- Accepting online deposits on your dealer website
- The part-exchange process: a guide for independent dealers
- Car finance for dealers
- Vehicle stock pages that convert: a dealer's playbook
