After a few months’ break, I’m back hunting the web for companies and service providers out there who are offering services which would be very familiar to ODR practitioners and researchers – but do so without making any mention of ODR, and beneath the radar of the ODR field in general. As earlier parts of this hunt have discussed, these are usually industry-specific initiatives. In my last report, I focused on an online negotiation platform aimed at the real-estate sector. Today, it’s on to another area such initiative aimed at car dealerships: WideStorm

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Transactions regarding vehicles have always been regarded as involving tough negotiation. We usually picture positional bargaining dynamics, often with a power differential involved.  The very notion of walking onto a used car lot or into a dealership is enough to keep some people driving their aging car long after they intended to. Popular culture has immortalized this in any number of TV shows, advertisements such as the (in)famous badger ads and movies such as Tin Men and Cadillac Man.

The availability of free online advertising, comparison mechanisms, reviews and complaint venues have repeatedly shaken up the traditional power and interaction structures of these interactions. I don’t think this has led to the forming of new structures; rather, to a much wider spectrum of skill, knowledge, adeptness (and on the other hand – blustering, bluffing and ignorance) on all sides involved: buyers, sellers and middlemen. See this depiction of the new-school car buyer meeting the old-school car salesperson. One initiative that seems to have been gaining some steam over the past couple of years is that of car dealerships interacting with clients on the internet in a way that cuts out some of the stress and pressure customers expect (and often dread) when buying a car, but still provides for negotiation. What is new here? Well, new and used dealerships have long used the internet as a display room, with the prospective buyer clicking on vehicles he or she likes, seeing some details, and being invited to come down to the dealership for full details and to discuss price. Others have provided buyers a method allowing them to avoid the anticipated unpleasant negotiation – by simply slapping a price tag on a car with a link saying ‘click to purchase’ in a take-it-or-leave-it fashion, eliminating the negotiation phase. Of course, buyers pay a mark-up for this luxury – and not everyone can afford this luxury, or live peacefully known that they have agreed, up-front, to be ‘taken’ by a dealership.

This is where WideStorm comes in. As you can read here, WideStorm is a platform developed to allow all stages of the car purchasing process – negotiation included – to be conducted online. Designed to be implemented by individual dealerships (in other words, the model is a b2c interaction, this isn’t a platform that creates an open market of unlimited buyers and unlimited sellers) WideStorm allows customers to conduct their research, car choice, add-on selection, etc. Once they have decided on the product itself, they enter an area where they communicate with the dealership’s representative on issues of financing and price, with repeated interactions until they reach agreement or impasse. While I’m sure that some of the usual, classic lines are still used (e.g., ‘sure, take your time, but these babies are selling out like hotcakes, it might be gone by the weekend’) but some of the other dynamics of the negotiation-at-the-car-dealership are changed. I haven’t been able to demo this, but I figure that this interface allows parties to be more relaxed and perhaps more integrative in their behavior: They can search for missing information on the web, together, send each other links, do the math at a speed both can follow and come up with a plan that (really) works for both parties. The slowed-down pace must allow both parties time to review the final offer with a friend or co-salesperson, before signifying their final agreement – resulting in less post-deal disappointment and perceptions of underhanded dealings. This could translate into increased desire for future interaction and positive reputation.

The company reports that dozens of dealerships have signed on and licensed the platform, as you can read here.

You’ll note that the article also mentions how General Motors and e-Bay were planning a joint venture to use the e-Bay Motors platform as a venue to market the company’s new cars. While this program went live in California for a brief period, it vanished afterwards and is proving a bit tricky to run down; I’ll try to explore the online negotiation aspects of this program, and find out what became of it, and report on it in a future piece.