For every 1,000 cars sold, customers click 1 to 2 million of those images—making merchandising photos one the single most important tools in car shopping.
Yet, most dealers tend to treat them as an afterthought, according to Joe Pistell, founder and president of AutoMagic Labs.
Taking focus: Those missed opportunities are exacerbated by factors like 80% of vehicle display page (VDP) time is spent clicking photos, the average used car costs $31K and is packed with hidden tech features, and the use of a generic "photo booth" approach to images that minimize key contextual elements of a vehicle.
“Shoppers gather most of their information from photographs and our dealers are producing photographs that are so generic and so vanilla and so like the last one that customers lose the idea,” of which photo is associated with a particular dealership, Pistell told Daily Dealer Live hosts, Sam D’Arc and Uli de’ Martino.
Take, for example, a dealer photographing a Ford F-150 in their inventory could find themselves competing with 100+ similar F-150s in the market—making it tougher for their Ford pickup to stand out to a potential buyer.
Getting tactical: AutoMagic Labs has a tool—currently in beta form—that aims to address the issues associated with generic photos in auto retail.
Leveraging its partnership with Chrome Data, the tool fetches build sheet information and uses AI to match visible photos—in real time—to features such as running boards, special packages, and hidden tech offerings and labels them, creating what’s known as "photo stages."
Measurable results: AutoMagic Labs’ analytics show that the engagement rate of photographs clicked is nearly 50% higher than the average with their solution, said Pistell.
“The better your photographs are, the more they click. The more they click, the more time they stay on your website. The more time they spend on your website, the less time they're at your competitors," explained Pistell.
Factors like leather seats being more common in today’s market and the inability to capture features like pedestrian detection in a photograph require a different approach to the process, explained Pistell.
Bottom line: In short, it’s important for dealers to realize that photos are key to engagement and retention, which requires leadership and the overall team to look at the process with a new eye to ensure that the photos are unique and tell the car’s full story, said Pistell.
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