Autobytelus Mediatoris

Family : consolidator
Sub-family : thematic
URL : http://www.autobytel.com

The car sales market by Internet has quickly been monopolised by a new type of dealer : Auto-by-tel. At a single site, you can compare the technical characteristics of all the makes of car available on the North American market, calculate the price of the various options and order by Internet. A salesperson will then contact you by e-mail or telephone. In the foreseeable future the customer will be able to phone direct from a Website. Contact with a salesperson remains indispensable for the purchase of a major piece of equipment. Electronic commerce is therefore not completely automatic. On Internet, a machine can't replace a person, but the two can work together.

In a market which is dominated by a handful of manufacturers world-wide (General Motors has a turnover of 1000 billion francs), the transformation could have been delayed by those who saw no reason to change a classic economic model. But the formula works : Auto-by-tel sells several hundred thousand cars each year, and it's not unique : Carpoint, http://www.carpoint.com and Autoweb, http://www.autoweb.com are not far behind.

In the short term, the commercial distribution network will come under scrutiny. Auto-by-tel's aim is clear : to reduce the dealer to a simple delivery service and recuperate all the commercial gain. But Auto-by-tel is going further, because it also controls a part of the car loans and insurance market by offering these services to its customers. The site also includes the sale of second-hand cars, the possibility of service contracts and publishes price comparisons, in the same way as Autojournal does. Sites such as Auto-by-tel are involved at all levels of the car industry. Soon the company will be selling several million vehicles, which will give it more power than any dealer or chain of dealers has ever had. It will be able to communicate as an equal with the ten main world manufacturers, which build between 2 million (for Renault/http://www.renault.com and PSA/http://www.psa.fr) and 8 million (General Motors/http://www.gm.com) vehicles.

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