By: Earl Brown, Autofusion (2023)
In early Spring of 2021, the retail automotive industry was suddenly faced with a nationwide production shortage on virtually all new vehicles. Dealers all over the country watched helplessly as allocation queues dried up and deliveries grinded to a crawl. This was primarily caused by high demand and a severe global shortage of silicon computer chips that made it nearly impossible for OEM’s to maintain production consistency. 
After consulting with numerous dealer clients, reviewing a wide range of inadequate OEM ‘build and price’ tools, and discovering that other major website and technology providers in the Automotive industry were not offering any solution to this growing problem, Autofusion decided to put it’s entire advanced development team on the task of helping our dealers find a new way to keep their shoppers in the funnel and moving towards a delivery.
Automotive product configurators at a retail-level simply were not something dealers (or their website providers) had ever considered building, it had always been a very expensive, complicated, and labor intensive piece of software best left to the manufacturers themselves. This inspired our innovative development team to take immediate action. The result? By May of 2021, before many providers were even aware of the problem, we had built what is (to this day) the best Custom Order / Build and Price solution available to retail automotive dealers.
In the almost 2 years since the inventory crunch began, our innovative custom order tool is still more attractive, more accurate, more useful for shoppers, and faster than any of the other OEM or website provider offerings that have sprung up.
Consumers love the modern retailing experience, and dealers love keeping their shoppers more engaged while capturing more qualified leads than ever before. Our Ford dealer clients by themselves accepted 32,979 new vehicle orders and leads in 2022 alone, some seeing averages as high as 180 leads/month. Well known dealer Bill Knight, of Bill Knight Ford, said:
“With the environment we’ve been in for the past 24 months, we needed a build and price tool that is easy and intuitive for the customer and ready the moment the order banks open. AutoFusion has been the easy answer for us and helped us lead the zone in retail orders in 2022. It keeps the customer on your site and makes the conversion from build & price to certified retail order a breeze. Highly recommend.”
Shopping for a new build and price tool for your dealership website may sound like a big project, but Autofusion works with you to make the process a breeze so you can focus on what matters most. We utilize a turn-key development process, which has us work directly with your website provider (even if it’s not us) to make sure your tool is properly installed. We custom build every product configurator to not only match your own unique brand style and website, but to sync perfectly with all factory ordering logic and accessories options, that way the entire system looks organic to your store.
Key features of our retail Custom Order application:
• The most accurate factory options data in the business, ensuring your shoppers have an accurate and transparent experience, and that only vehicles that CAN exist are able to be built with the tool.
• Custom designed to fit into your website seamlessly, so that it feels like a natural part of your dealership’s digital shopping process.
• Offer a complete vehicle merchandising and product ordering experience for your customers, while maintaining total control over pricing, options, dealer added equipment, incentives, and more.
Some of the benefits for dealers who have our Custom Order application installed on their site include:
• Ability to presell inventory to maintain a ZERO day turn time
•Better merchandising for your vehicles and dealer-installed options
•Keep your customers more engaged, and moving towards a real conversion
•Build legitimate factory spec orders, while keeping shoppers on your own site.
Consumers demand a more relevant and transparent online shopping experience, the dealers who deliver that experience will be the dealers who find it easiest to grow their local and regional market share. To learn more about recent changes and updates we’ve made to the Custom Order Tool, CLICK HERE. To schedule your dealerships demo and start your custom build- CLICK HERE or contact our sales team at sales@autofusion.com
