ATLANTA -

According to a new study, consumers no longer compare car buying to a stubborn root canal.

In fact, as auto dealers move more steps of the retail process online, consumer satisfaction is at an all-time high.

“According to our data, car buyers have never been happier,” Cox Automotive vice president of research and market intelligence Isabelle Helms said in a news release regarding the findings of Cox Automotive’s Digitization of End-to-End Retailing study, or DoEER.

In the vehicle buying process, according to the study, the average vehicle buyer now visits only two dealerships. That is a decline from 2.7 in 2016.

Buyers are spending less time at dealerships and benefitting from more efficient, digital retailing processes. That has helped increase the percentage of those who were “highly satisfied” with the overall shopping experience. The percentage jumped from 60% in 2019 to 72% now.

Cox Automotive implemented the study to measure and understand the shifts in consumer preference toward a more online purchase process. The company interviewed 1,859 purchase intenders starting in August, along with 462 franchised auto dealers that offer digital retailing tools.

The company took on the study while noting that digital retailing is not new to the automobile business. Cox Automotive said it has long been a proponent of the approach and has offered tools to help dealers move more of the purchase process online.

But according to the study, only one out of three franchised U.S. automobile dealers offer all the purchase steps online.

Cox Automotive also said it still believes auto dealerships as physical locations play a very important role in the vehicle buying experience. That is the case even as interest in digital retailing continues to grow, and that digital retailing interest showed strong growth last year during the pandemic.

Research shows that automobile shoppers still prefer to spend quality time at the dealership, Cox said. Those shoppers want to test drive the vehicle and set up their new vehicle after purchase. The company said those hands-on activities are much more enjoyable and informative than filling out paperwork and waiting.

But with that being said, the future is digital, according to Cox. The entire process, all the way to  negotiating the final purchase price, is moving online.

Cox Automotive research in 2017 showed that 25% of buyers wanted to finalize the vehicle price online.

That number jumped to almost 40% by 2020.

According to Cox, dealers have noticed that trend. Of the franchised dealers surveyed in the DoEER study, 80% planned to offer even more aspects of the purchase process online in the next one to two years.

But even with the statistic mentioned earlier that only one out of three franchised U.S. automobile dealers offer all the purchase steps online, Cox Automotive said the shift is on.

Sixty-nine percent of franchised dealers last year added at least one digital step because of COVID-19.

Seventy-four percent said their customers have increased their use of digital retailing tools since the onset of the pandemic.

Finding information on incentives, calculating monthly payments, applying for credit, and finalizing the vehicle price were among the most popular activities for shoppers to complete online or at home.

“Importantly, franchised automobile dealers know what the future holds,” Cox Automotive wrote. Seventy-five percent of surveyed dealers would not be able to survive in the long run without adopting digital retailing tools and moving more of their sales process online.

Cox described digital retailing as a win for consumers and dealers. The study showed that 64% of shoppers want more of the purchase process to happen online, compared to the last time they bought a vehicle.

Franchised dealers also see the appeal of the shift to digital retailing. For 61% of those surveyed dealers, digital retailing efforts allow them to spend less time on a sale. More than half of them say it helps them improve the customer experience. And 75% of dealers say shoppers get a more customized experience through digital retailing, which Cox said is important to greater satisfaction with the shopping process.

"Consumers have long asked for a process that is more efficient and requires less time at the dealership,” Helms said.

Helms also said, “With more steps moving online, that’s exactly what they are getting. And it is not just consumers who are benefitting. Dealers, too, are seeing the advantages of a more efficient, streamlined purchasing process.”

Concurrent with the release of the DoEER study, Cox Automotive is launching an end-to-end digital retail experience that allows consumers and retailers to complete the shopping and buying processes from anywhere.

The service is called Complete Retail, and Cox said it is the first end-to-end retail experience to bear the Cox Automotive name. It is underpinned by and serviced through a suite of the company solutions: Autotrader, Dealer.com, Dealertrack, Kelley Blue Book and VinSolutions.

More findings from the Cox Automotive study can be found below:

Benefits of using digital retailing, among franchise dealers

Reduced time spent on sale: 61%

Improved customer experience: 53%

Expanded customer reach/market: 47%

Increased total vehicle sales: 46%

More qualified leads: 46%

Source: Cox Automotive’s Digitization of End-to-End Retailing study