Recent Press

Monterey, California – July 12, 2021 – Stellantis NV’s Chrysler brand ranked highest in the 2021 Pied Piper Omnichannel PSI^® for Electric Vehicles (EVs) Auto Industry Study, which answered the question, “What happens when EV customers shop for a vehicle by first visiting the brand’s website, or a dealership website, and then visiting a dealership in person?” BMW was ranked second of the twenty-one battery electric or plug-in hybrid EV brands evaluated, followed by BMW’s Mini brand.

How customers shop completely changed in the late 2000s with widespread acceptance and use of smart phones. As an example, in 2007, the year the iPhone was introduced, online retailer Amazon did $15 billion in sales. Last year, Amazon’s revenues exceeded $300 billion, and today customers almost always begin their shopping online, even if they eventually visit a store in-person. More recently, brands that traditionally relied only on in-person sales have embraced new online digital retail tools. For the auto industry this has meant the appearance of “Buy Now,” or “Buy from Home” buttons on brand and dealer websites, along with other online digital retail tools like inventory search, payment calculator, trade-in value estimator, test-drive request and others.

This new approach to shopping and purchase, which combines and integrates the online and in-store experience, is called “Omnichannel Selling,” and for the auto industry it results in the following customer path:

• A customer moves from a brand website
• to a dealership website and start of communication with the dealership,
• to visiting the dealership in-person,
• and the customer may then go back home again and back onto the websites before committing to buy either online or back at the dealership in person.