With 87 million visits and about 11 million uniques visitors each month, Auto Trader is one of the biggest UK websites, having transitioned from their roots as a print catalogue to a fully digital data driven tech company today. We spoke to Ian Plummer, Commercial Director at Auto Trader, in advance of him presenting at ChannelX World in October to discover more about the Auto Trader marketplace and lessons he has to share.
Ian talks about the huge amounts of data points Auto Trader amass and how they make this data freely available to their marketplace partners – the car resellers, dealers and related businesses such as finance and insurance houses, and how this drive efficiencies across the entire motors industry.
That doesn’t imply that we expect everybody to be buying a car fully end-to-end online but it does imply that consumers want to do most of the car buying jobs digitally today and definitely tomorrow. So what we want to do is enable all our retailers to be able to take a consumer further down the digital retailing journey – part exchange, valuations, getting finance done online – all of those sort of things and parking a deal if you like in the retailer system.
We’re not a retailer what we want to do is enable retailers to go on the kind of Journey you just described modernizing digitizing improving the way they work so that it’s better for the consumer and ultimately better back for the retailer.
– Ian Plummer, Commercial Director, Auto Trader
Ian went on to say “You take out the angst, keep the physical sort of emotional positive warmth of buying a car that you need to do physically but improve everything else digitally“.
At ChannelX World on the 11th of October, Ian promises to share insights around how we can use data to make marketplaces smarter for retailers and partners and the valuable things that people can do, not just with information but actionable Insights, for example using marketplace data to inform how they target their PPC spend on Google!
To hear more from Ian Plummer, book your ticket for ChannelX World here to attend on the 11th October.
In this video, you will find:
- 00:00 Ian’s role as Commercial Director at Auto Trader
- 01:46 How Auto Trader transitioned from a print player to a digital business
- 03:51 Auto Trader Tech Data strategy
- 05:09 Digital Retailing and enabling the consumer journey
- 06:09 The digital experience consumers demand
- 06:59 What can retailers expect to learn from Ian at ChannelX World?
- 09:27 The connections Ian hopes to get from ChannelX World
One Response
Really interesting interview Chris. Auto trader is a real powerhouse it seems still and have transitioned well, although I used to love their magazines back in the day!