DriveTime Launches Cutting Edge Mobile Site; Digital Retailing Reimagined

TEMPE, Ariz., Feb. 13, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- DriveTime, the nation's second largest used vehicle retailer focused solely on used vehicle sales, today announced its launch of a new mobile site.

The new mobile site innovations extend to both the customer experience and the technology DriveTime employed in launching it.  Customers will now see:

• Improved and faster page navigation when customers are on our site (single-page application platform)
• Changes to content layout and imagery based on user behavior
• Content tailored to the phone location (geolocation logic)
• Enhanced vehicle photos
• New search filters to enable customers to find exactly what they are looking for in DriveTime's new used car inventory, including number of prior owners and accidents
• Market price comparisons on thousands of used vehicles
• Three day guaranteed online pricing of customer trade ins (testing in select markets)
• Easy to find Autocheck vehicle history reports on any of the 15,000+ DriveTime used vehicles available nationwide.

At the same time, DriveTime has retained all of the existing customer friendly features of the DriveTime experience, including streamlined contracting and e-signing, speed of financing online with a credit score and starting down payment in less than two minutes, no haggle pricing, a no questions asked 5 day used vehicle return program, and salaried sales advisors at our dealerships focused on helping our customers find the right used vehicle for them from the thousands of used vehicles we have available.

"There are a number of off the shelf mobile or website products offered by vendors to the new and used car industry.  With over 1.2 million users each month on our desktop and mobile sites, we elected to custom develop our mobile site based on what customers are telling us they want?quick and easy access to the information they want to see, a customer experience game changer in used vehicle retailing.  We're just beginning to reimagine the entire vehicle retail experience," stated Scott Worthington, VP/Retail, Retail Marketing.

DriveTime also found it needed cutting edge technology to deliver these unique, new customer experiences:

Don Irwin, Director, IT, and Shawn Curran, Managing Director, Retail/Marketing, Product Development, said:

"With 125+ IT employees at DriveTime, we have a large pool of IT expertise to draw on to review and execute exciting new technologies that allow us to truly enhance the customer experience within the used car industry.  And, the mobile site was a key priority for our digital retailing initiatives. Because of our customer experience focus, load time and navigation performance were critical concerns during the development of the new site.  It was also a lot of fun to dig further into SEO compatibility because of our unique approach with the single-page application platform.  Our team also implemented a best in breed solution incrementally delivering data as required to make the used car shopping experience as fast as possible.  We accomplished this using the Angular 4+ client-side framework and Node.js for the server build, and for data and other dependencies we were able to use bleeding edge technologies like Azure CosmosDB, Azure Search, Azure CDN, Redis Cache and Azure Service Bus.  From an IT perspective, we had a blast with this project!"

About DriveTime

Headquartered in Tempe, Arizona, DriveTime is the nation's second largest vehicle retailer focused solely on used vehicles.  DriveTime operates over 140 dealerships nationwide with annual sales exceeding 150,000 used vehicles and 1.2 million+ monthly visitors to its website.  DriveTime now provides used vehicles and used vehicle financing to the full range of customers in the market today, including competitively priced, lower mileage used cars.  Transforming the buying and financing of a used vehicle with a fair and transparent experience, DriveTime offers used car features on its online inventory; speed of financing including a credit score and the starting down payment in less than two minutes; prices on every used vehicle online and at its dealerships; no haggle pricing; salaried associates trained to help our customers find the right used vehicle for them; and a five day, no questions asked used vehicle return program. 

For more information, access the DriveTime website at www.drivetime.com or contact us at DriveTime, 1720 West Rio Salado Pkwy, Tempe, AZ  85281. Phone: 602-852-6600.

SOURCE DriveTime