How Fast Merchandising Gives Car Dealers a Competitive Edge

Did you know that almost 82% of the total automotive buyers conduct online research before visiting dealerships? Now, imagine showcasing your cars to all these buyers with blurry and inconsistent images from awkward angles. How often do you think one is going to explore your cars, and for how long? None, right! Indeed, this is where car merchandising plays a vital role. How you showcase your cars really matters, especially in this digital era, where most of your buyers are looking at your cars online.

In this blog, you will learn how fast car merchandising helps your dealership business. And why it really matters. Together, you will explore common challenges that dealerships often face in merchandising their cars online and the best solutions to overcome these challenges. So, let’s dive deeper and explore how fast merchandising for car dealerships helps you stay ahead in today’s competitive market.

What is Car Merchandising?

Car merchandising is the process of presenting, positioning, and promoting cars in a way that makes them more appealing to potential buyers. It helps drive more sales in both online and in-person by assisting buyers in understanding the cars more clearly. It includes everything from high-quality visuals to detailed descriptions, accurate pricing, lot presentation, and listing optimization. 

Why Speed Matters in Digital Car Merchandising?

Hundreds of buyers visit automotive marketplaces every minute. Further, delaying your listings can cost you real opportunities or potential buyers. The faster you upload clean and clear visuals, accurate details, and compelling descriptions, the sooner your car appears in front of ready-to-buy customers.

It also reduces the dependency on manual processes and external photographers. With fast car marketplace merchandising, you can maintain consistent and competitive pricing, especially when new inventory comes into your dealership.

How Fast Car Merchandising Benefits Dealerships?

Fast merchandising for car dealerships helps put your best cars in front of the right buyers at the right time, while boosting both your brand presence and operational efficiency. Here’s how speeding up your merchandising process directly helps your dealership grow.

1. Boost Engagement: Showcasing your cars with multi-format visuals, including images, videos, and rotating car visuals, captures buyers’ attention. In fact, 54% of automotive buyers spend more of their time watching car videos while researching. Faster listing helps you be visible when the buyer searches for cars.

2. Enhance Online Visibility: Do you know that marketplaces and social platforms prioritize fresh, high-quality listings? Indeed, if you upload your car listing quickly, your cars are more likely to appear more frequently and even rank higher, boosting your online visibility. Also, it will enhance your CTR (Click-Through Rate).

3. Reduce Inventory Ageing: When vehicles sit waiting for photoshoots or manual edits, they lose valuable market time. Whereas fast merchandising ensures that every car goes live on the same day it arrives at your dealership, reducing “days on market”.

4. Maintains Consistency: Fast merchandising for dealerships usually comes with automated tools like Spyne AI that standardize backgrounds, lighting, and angles. This consistency builds trust and makes your brand instantly recognized.

5. Influence Buyer’s Decision: High-quality visuals uploaded quickly give buyers more confidence to shortlist your vehicles. When they see a complete and well-presented listing early, it increases the chances of them reaching out first, improving your conversion potential.

What Are The Challenges Dealerships Face While Merchandising Their Cars?

Merchandising cars faster is not always possible or easy, especially when relying on manpower for it. There are numerous challenges that dealerships often face while getting their cars listed faster. Let’s explore them: 

1. Inconsistent Photo Quality: Even after hiring a professional photographer, the final results are not always the same, which creates inconsistency in your visuals. Some visuals are good, but others are rushed, of low quality, or missing angles.

2. Manual Editing Delays: The most time-consuming process in merchandising is manual editing. It takes up a huge amount of time to get the final result. Waiting to get your visuals done often slows down the process or creates inconsistency.

3. Incomplete Shot Lists: A dealership always has to allow its buyers to inspect the car from multiple angles. And sometimes, while rushing the car photography process, photographers miss some angles, which causes issues. Publishing those visuals negatively impacts your online brand value.

4. Dependency on External Vendors: Hiring an agency makes you completely dependent on them. It often creates coordination issues, and sometimes it may also create conflict between the agency and your internal team.

5. Slow Publishing: Manually uploading images to multiple platforms is a time-consuming process. It slows down the publishing process and can even take hours just to publish one car’s visuals and information across multiple sites and platforms.

All these challenges slow down your listing process and increase operating costs. They could also negatively impact your brand image and online reputation. So, how can you overcome all these challenges all at once? Well, it’s all possible with Spyne’s AI-powered solutions.

How To Overcome Car Merchandising Challenges With Spyne’s AI-Powered Solution

Whether it’s capturing car images, enhancing them, and converting them into studio-grade visuals, or publishing them across multiple platforms. All of this is possible with Spyne’s Studio AI, an AI-powered solution that allows dealerships to grow faster.

1. Automates the Entire Workflow: With our Studio-AI, all you have to do is click some pictures from your device, and our AI will handle the rest. From editing to publishing across multiple platforms, every process gets automated. It saves you hours and your operational costs.

2. Boost Engagement & Conversion: Our AI can convert all your raw and outside images into professional studio-like visuals. Not only this, but with our advanced AI technology, you get the most realistic output, attracting more buyers. It will boost your engagement, clicks, and conversions.

3. Bulk Processing: You don’t have to wait for one photo to get edited so that you can move to the next one. With our Visual Studio-AI, you can process an entire batch of car images in one go, saving hours.

4. Smooth Integration With CRM: Our AI-powered tool offers a smooth integration with your existing CRM & DMS. This means your visuals automatically sync with your listings. Everything flows smoothly from capture and edit to publish.

5. Easy Accessible: You can use our Studio-AI on any device. Whether it’s your phone, laptop, or tablet, there’s no need for special equipment or high-end cameras. We offer an entire workflow that is fast, flexible, and dealership-friendly.

6. Background Removal & Replacement: With our AI-powered tool, you can remove or replace your car backgrounds with studio-like backgrounds. It allows you to maintain consistency across your listings.

7. Realistic Output: Our AI understands automotive surfaces, reflections, and color accuracy with precision. It enhances your visuals while keeping them natural and realistic under different lighting settings.

Spyne Case Study: How We Helped the Royal Family Reduce Its Merchandising Cost By 20x With Studio-AI

Royal Family Motors is a renowned name in the car dealership business in the US. They were once facing challenges with their merchandising cost. They paid $80 per car for photoshoots and heavily relied on external vendors, which delayed their listings and impacted brand consistency.

However, after switching to Spyne’s Studio AI, they were able to shoot, edit, and publish visuals with their phones in just a few minutes. They no longer need external vendors. This helped reduce car dealership merchandising costs by 20x and listing turnaround time by 14x. They achieved consistent, studio-quality output for every car in their car listings.

Read the full case study here.

Conclusion

Fast merchandising for dealerships is a necessity to stay ahead in this competitive market, where every buyer and dealership is online. Showcasing cars quickly with consistent, high-quality, and interactive visuals attracts more buyers.

With solutions like Spyne’s Studio AI, dealerships can automate the manual workflow, reducing operational costs. It optimizes the entire merchandising cycle from start to finish. Want to list your cars faster, improve visual consistency, and grow your dealership’s online presence? Try our Studio-AI now.

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