The automobile industry has witnessed the advent of E-commerce 2.0, which meansthe e-dealers and traditional dealers will cooperate, rather than compete with each other as they used to do and their relationshipswith manufacturers will also be different.
Zuoliang Wang is the founder and CEO of ichefeng.com, an on-line car dealer in China. He told China Business News, “We used to kind of begging manufacturers for cooperation, but never got a chance to get cars directly from them. But recently I got calls from a couple very prestigious brands, yes, they actually called us for cooperation.” Along with the changes from manufacturers, the traditional dealers also started to cooperate with e-dealers. For the time being, 50% of the cars sold by ichefeng.com are supplied by traditional off-line dealers and sometimes 60% of some 4S dealers’ sales are counting on ichefeng.com.
This change is actually very intriguing, considered the car manufacturers and traditional dealers used to see these e-dealers as envy intruders. The truth is it’s getting harder and harder for the traditional dealers to sell cars due to China’s slowing down auto market. On the other hand, all kinds of E-commerce platform are gaining great popularity. For example, Ichefeng.com sold 4348 units on the first day of its promotional campaign starting a couple days ago. Maihaoche.com, another very young on-line car dealer in China, could sell around 500 units per month. Under this background, traditional dealers and the emerging e-dealers just get to learn to cooperate in a bid to achieve a win-win balance.
