Santander Consumer Finance (SCF) recently revealed plans to launch an online marketplace for dealers to market their vehicles. Labelled Your Red Car (YRC), the new platform has been earmarked for a Q1 2021 launch.
Motor Finance speaks to Denton Brock, head of channel development at SCF, about the ins and outs of YRC ahead of its launch.
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The idea for YRC, explains Brock, was born out of an ever-increasing cost for SCF’s dealer partners around how much they were spending on advertising.
“We conducted market research to quantify what those values were and for some of the smaller dealers, it was very significant in terms of overall marketing spend. The current online portal space, for dealers to promote their stock is confusing and crowded, with lots of new alternative entrants.
“We haven’t seen anybody come in and offer a viable alternative and the reason we think that is because you need three key ingredients: a dealer network, a brand and a customer base.”
Brock says that the plan is not to rival Auto Trader, with YRC fitting into a natural gap in the current marketplace. “We’ve got access to 14m customers, which is around 20% of the driving population. We’re not planning on doing any major TV advertising or online paid search results, because it is such a huge cost.
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By GlobalData“Our brand values as a bank are that we want to help our businesses prosper. YRC is really an extension of our existing digital proposition. We offer lots of different products from a renewals platform to finance calculators that are free for our dealers. YRC will be an extension of that.”
Your Red Car’s green light
“It’s totally supported by our parent bank, Santander. YRC has been given the green light to launch in the first quarter of 2021,” notes Brock. “We have started to go out to visit our dealer partners and the current uptake for YRC has been very successful.
“We also conducted a proof-of-concept last year with a few dealers and the feedback was great. So to have those results in the real world too has been brilliant. The dealers absolutely love it and the 91% uptake shows that.”
What is unique about the YRC proposition is that dealers do not pay to advertise their vehicles. The only fee is one associated with the platform once a successful sale has been made. While SCF has not yet disclosed how much that fee will be, Brock said the intention is to make it the same price for every dealer – whether they have one site or multiple sites.
“It’s important to state that this is all about selling more cars for our dealers,” continues Brock. “It’s not about selling more finance for us – the consumer does not have to take our finance at all.”
“We have developed the product ourselves, using industry-leading experts to create and grow the product as we wish and we’re now in the final stages of testing the solution, whilst onboarding our dealer partners.
“We conducted market research, and what consumers said was that many retail sites within our industry are really noisy, with lots of flashing buttons and other things.
“Consumers said they don’t like that noise – they want something that’s clean. As a result, there is no advertising on YRC; it is literally a car search facility where you can search by make, model or monthly payment. We’ll also have car reviews and will be using CAP and Motorspecs data to enhance the dealer stock feed.”
The intention is that the car price is the same as what the consumer would pay on other online sites, according to Brock, with the added security of the vehicles being within SCF’s approved dealer network.
“The YRC policy is to only have dealers and businesses that we deal with, providing customers with peace of mind. From a dealer’s perspective, following the proof of concept, we have a stock feed process to make it simple for them to upload their vehicles and everything else is done for them. It’s a no-brainer.”
The YRC marketplace will be accessible through a web browser, with Brock stressing the importance for it to be device responsive and accessible by all platforms.
A bonus feature of YRC and an additional draw for customers will be an e-gift reward for those who complete a purchase via the platform.
“We’re anticipating that about 70% of the people using YRC will be on their mobile, so an e-gift works really well. You can download it onto your phone and use it in-store or online at most high
street retailers.”
