Nissan to sell cars online in India

                                                                          

New Delhi: Japan’s Nissan Motor Co. said on Monday that it will start selling its cars online in India, following the example of Skoda Cars India Pvt. Ltd.
Customers will be able to book their cars by paying with a credit card. The car will then be delivered to the customer by the nearest Nissan dealership, the company said in a statement.
Skoda had started this service in October this year. A customer can book a Skoda vehicle by making an advance payment of Rs5,000. The customer will be fully refunded if he chooses to cancel the booking.
Experts said it’s an experiment, which may work for a company like Nissan, which has few sales and service points and it will gain in the smaller cities and towns.
Japanese automaker Nissan was late in entering the Indian market and it started selling its products in India from 2010. It has at least 100 dealerships with only six in the national capital region, a Nissan India spokesperson said It sells models including the Micra, Sunny and Terrano.
Praveen Sinha, co-founder and managing director of Jabong.com, said if Nissan could crack the markets and customize the delivery options to consumers, it has the potential to fulfil a latent demand, especially in smaller towns.
To be sure, websites such as eBay and olx.in sell second-hand cars. Online retail accounts for a minuscule $600 million (around Rs3,600 crore), compared with India’s $518 billion brick and mortar retail industry, according to a report by consulting firm Technopak. E-commerce has a potential to grow to as much as $76 billion by 2021.
Sinha said that in markets where dealers are not present or are scarce, consumers largely travel to larger cities or book vehicles through brokers. “If the company can target such markets then there might be sizable orders.”
Nitish Tipnis, director, marketing, Hover Automotive India, (Nissan’s national sales company), said that buyers doing research about cars on the web before making a purchase prompted the company’s decision to sell the cars online.
Nissan India is putting in place suitable payment gateways with the help of specific car portals to ensure timely delivery and service at the time of purchase.
According to a study by the Boston Consulting Group done earlier this year, 56% of Indians who purchased a car had access to the Internet. Of these, 22% used the Internet to do preliminary research.
“It seems like a logical step to take, given that when it comes to buying vehicles a large number of consumers do rely on the internet for research and pricing. Pre-purchase research is a big thing online,” said Arvind Subramanian, partner and director at Boston Consulting Group.