India’s largest eCommerce company, mJunction services limited has launched a path breaking automobile portal, autojunction.in through which it plans to sell Cars online for the first time in India. The portal aims at making the car buying experience hassle free by providing complete end to end car buying options in the Internet itself. mJunction is a joint venture between SAIL and Tata Steel.
mJunction services has tied up with Electric car manufacturing company Reva Electric to be its first Auto eRetail partner to sell the Reva i electric car. For Reva electric car company, which has very limited number of dealers all over India, this association will be a big boost to improve their sales. mJunction plans to tie up with more automobile manufacturers to sell their products online in he future.
The portal has the option of purchasing the three varients of Reva i – Standard, AC and Classe. It also provides the option to customize the car by picking a favorite color among the list of 6 available colors and by picking the accessories among the available. An advance non refundable amount has to be paid while checkout and the balance amount has to be paid before the car despatch by the manufacturers. Autojunction.in’s Authorized Service Franchise partner(ASFP) across the country will assist in vehicle delivery and other registration formalities. In addition to the buying option, the site also has general information about Reva brand including Virtual demo of its varients.
The new launched portal on the first look looks extremely simple and nice. The overall buying process is just a five click process including all customization process, though some two intermediate steps can be avoided with a better design. The site fails to work properly in Firefox but has no issues in Internet Explorer. I really wonder many times on why this web developers ignores the fastest growing browser , Firefox while designing the site. The homepage of the portal is completely customized to include Reva’s detail and looks better and exhaustive than Reva’s official site. I’m not sure how they are going to retain the homepage when they tie up with one another manufacturer.
Automobile eRetailing is very immense in India. According to autojunction.in estimates, eRetailing saves 40 -50 % of distibution cost of Cars , which will then result in Rs. 12,000 to 14,000 rupess of benefit in the cost of Cars to the customers. This is the key to drive customers to pick eRetailing over existing dealer based buying options. Also eRetailing need not to be considered as a threat to the normal dealer network sales system, because unlike consumer electronic sales, Automobile sales needs has huge role for dealers in delivery and after sales support. So both eRetailing and dealer based system can coexists and help each other to grow.