In a period where the world is becoming digitized day after day, it is essential for car dealers to follow the same wavelength. Creating a professional website will attract new customers to car dealerships and improve their search engine rankings. If you still have the mindset of creating a dealer website for cars, now is the right time to invest in it.
As mad as it sounds, you can create a car dealer website without writing a single line of code. Strikingly doesn’t require you to have all the programming language experience or attain the most prominent coding degrees in the world. All we want is to have a creative brain, which will allow you to put your marketing ideas forward. This article will share our thoughts about the most important features and strategies to effectively create a dealer website for cars.
Important Features of a Car Dealership Website
It may look challenging to sell vehicles via an online business due to a high number of variables found within each of them. However, if you want to build a car dealer website, you must know that it is more than just getting in touch with the world of eCommerce. When you consider a particular marketplace, you must understand that every marketplace has two critical objectives i.e., buy or sell a car. Website owners must ensure that they help the users at every given opportunity.
A. Registration
The most important feature of a car dealership website is the sign-up or registration process. Completing the registration process and getting in touch with the functionality must be fast and easy. When you visit a car dealership website, we recommend you to have an account on either Google or Facebook.
B. Verification
Secondly, verification is essential in building trust between the visitor and the website owner.
C. Payment Options
Lastly, the payment procedure must be quick and efficient so that there are no interferences regardless of the customer’s location. Strikingly provides different payment options (such as Stripe, Paypal, and Square) for the visitors so that they find it easy to complete that procedure.
Best Strategies to Create a Car Dealership Website
1. Get a Domain
If you have established websites before, you must know that every website is associated with a domain name. In simple words, your brand name will ideally end with .com. If you cannot get a domain name similar to your brand name, you can change it by adding an extra element after your brand name. For example, you can add “cars” or “dealers” at the end of your business name. One of the most important car dealer website tips is to choose a domain name that corresponds with your business. For example, you can’t have a car dealership's domain name and spend your time talking about aircraft and bikes.
Image taken from Strikingly
Once you have found the right domain name for your brand, you can host your domain with us by creating your website through any of our paid plans. You can purchase the domain from us by going to our domain name registrar. Make sure that you enter the domain name that you want to buy and pay the fee ($24.95 per year) in doing so. Domain names are essential in giving your website a custom address and improving your website’s search engine optimization (SEO) score.
2. Ensure Fast Navigation
In creating a car dealer website, it is crucial to get yourself notified that easy and fast navigation will be precisely what your website visitors will be looking for. By having all the elements your visitors need, you will give many reasons for your website visitors to stay at your website for a more extended period and discover other things. If your website doesn’t have any navigation, visitors will only feel confused on your platform and will leave it.
Image taken from Strikingly User’s Website
Difficult website navigation will also be abandoned by your customers. For example, if your elements are lengthy and have more than 30 characters, it will confuse the customers. Moreover, if your navigation bar doesn’t have a search bar, it will alone be enough for the customers to abandon your website. On Strikingly, we ensure our users create websites that are easy to use for customers. After customizing the template, you can add sections and site searches to your website.
3. Mobile-Friendly Design
If we talk about the car dealer website design, it should always be mobile-friendly. A responsive mobile design will enable you to attract new potential visitors to your website. As you know, most people worldwide are using smartphones rather than their desktops/laptops. They would want the information to be presented to them quickly. Therefore, consider them and ensure that you don’t lose traffic based on your negligence, disregarding those customers.
Image taken from Strikingly
Having a design just for desktop visitors isn’t enough these days. By having a responsive mobile design, you will have every chance to make your website rank well in the Google search engine results. Strikingly enables the users to get a comprehensive view of their website in both the mobile and desktop versions while creating modifications. This feature of Strikingly is simply outstanding because you are aware of every detail related to your website.
4. Quality Functionality
By adding quality functionality to your website, you can provide good customer service for your viewers. You must know all the details surrounding your added functionality and its role in creating a car dealer website. Strikingly understands everything related to features and functionalities required to build a professional website. For example, if you have a product page with images and detailed descriptions, it will enable your customers to inspect an item that they are willing to buy.
Image taken from Crystal Car Wash
Apart from that, you can add a login section to ensure that your viewers become members of your website. If you have subscription plans related to your website, you can guide your customers about it. You can also create a contact form that can benefit your customer. This section will answer all their queries, which hopefully can be converted to sales.
5. Quality Showroom Photos
Image taken from Schmicko
When you create a car dealer website, you must know the significance of website images. You must include quality showroom photos to feel like they are visiting a showroom. By having stunning images of your branded cars, you have a strong possibility of getting positive scores in terms of audience rating and reviews. Strikingly website builder makes it easy for the customers to add images to their website. You can easily upload images from your computer or web.
6. Consider Your Target Audience
If you want to know how to build a car dealer website, you must completely understand the market situation. Before the internet came into existence, people in the US tended to go through the dealers’ showrooms to visualize the new and used cars in the market. Things haven’t changed a lot in the past few decades as people still do a similar kind of market research, but they do it online.
You must consider the states' legislation to launch your car website as a website owner. For example, in many states of America, you will be eligible to get a full license at 16, so your website will be developed for teens and above. The website should bring satisfactory scores from both the buyers and the sellers, and the users should find it easy to switch between these roles.
7. Monetization
Selling cars can prove to be a lucrative business. There are many options to consider for the monetization of your car website. In the car dealer website guide, the possibilities are as follows:
- Your website can have the ability to charge individual sellers and dealers a certain percentage of each fee or a monthly fee for placing their offers.
- Premium features should be eligible for both buyers and sellers. When a visitor has a premium subscription, it may prioritize search results, detailed search functionality, flexible payment methodologies, and other aspects.
- Car marketplaces can create a rule for charging a one-time fee for posting a vehicle for selling purposes.
Conclusion
We hope that these tips help you completely understand car dealerships. For obvious reasons, running a car marketplace in an established country, such as the United States, means a tremendous amount of responsibility and work. However, the size of the market, the audience’s buying power, and the traditions will ensure that you create a profitable business out of it.
Image taken from Strikingly
As compared to the previous years, creating a car dealer website isn’t as hard as it seems. All you need to do is find an effective website builder, such as Strikingly. Once you choose a suitable website template out of our collection, you can customize and ensure that your car marketplace website looks exactly how you want. If you have the intention, make sure you go through the already established websites related to the car dealership and get inspired.
