Geely launches end-to-end online car shopping website amid coronavirus outbreak



Geely has launched its proprietary online car buying service, making it one of the first brands in China to offer a full ‘contactless’ vehicle purchasing experience.

Customers are able to customise, pay and take delivery of their new Geely vehicle without taking a step out from their own homes. The service also offers test drives from their homes, in coordination with their local dealerships.

The online “dealership” will also provide additional services such as licensing and insurance in the purchasing process, offering customers a multitude of different financing and insurance options through the online platform.

Although Geely has previously explored online sales via partnership with third party online platforms, Geely says that its proprietary online sales portal, soft-launched on the 10th of February 2020, has already increased its online sales by fivefold in its first week of operation, compared to the same period last year. In the same timeframe, sales leads generated from the website has also increased more than 75 times.

Geely aims to expand the service to include home servicing – where Geely will collect your vehicles for servicing and return them to your home in the near future, and even home or office location maintenance in the future.

Geely Auto Group Vice President of Public Relations, Victor Yang said, “The addition of our online sales platform has proven to be a value addition to our sales network in terms of adding new sales and new sales leads to our national wide dealership network. We have always aimed to bring greater levels of convenience to our consumers and our initial results prove that.”

As pointed out by Automotive News, one reason that Geely have expedited the launch of the online portal could be due to the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, COVID-19. In the first 16 days of February, car sales in China plunged by 92%; Geely’s car production output also dropped to approximately one-third of its usual capacity.

Locally, Proton, a joint venture between DRB-HICOM and Geely, has also experimented with online-based car sales, though the local effort stops at just the order booking procedure.