The largest European online car market, AutoScout24, enters the B2B business. With the purchase of AUTOproff, the leading European B2B marketplace for car dealers, Autoscout24 gains access to more than 43,000 dealers across Europe and opens up a completely new business area. More than 20,000 registered car dealers can buy and sell vehicles in real time through the AUTOproff app. In 2021, more than 120,000 cars were traded through this channel.
The takeover between two European champions highlights a general trend in the industry: the development of online automotive platforms into providers of holistic offers for everything to do with cars. In the case of Autoscout, this specifically means expanding the platform for used cars into a holistic online car dealership. In addition to new cars, the company will also offer sales-related services such as transport, management of the necessary documents and payment processing through the acquisition of AUTOproff. The race for pole position in the digital car market in Europe is therefore a competition between full-service providers. If you consider that in the largest European market, Germany, almost half of all new vehicles are financed (in the case of used vehicles it is still around a third), online financing solutions play a key role in the digital reorganization of this promising market.
The more diverse the financing options and the more customer-friendly they are, the more attractive the respective platforms become for the end customer. The online retailer Amazon justifies its position by strictly focusing on the customer – including financing solutions.
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