What is Vehicle Merchandising for Car Dealerships?
Vehicle merchandising for car dealerships refers to all the ways you can visually present your inventory to make it more appealing and drive more sales — both on your lot and online. It’s how you make every car shine, grab attention, and differentiate your vehicles from the dealership down the street.
Shopify defines merchandising as:
“Merchandising is everything you do to promote and sell your products once the potential customer is in your store.”
While that works for retail, automotive merchandising has its own flavor. At its core, it means making your vehicles stand out — from the moment a shopper scrolls through your inventory online, to the time they walk the lot.
In this guide, we’ll focus exclusively on the vehicle merchandising strategies that help you attract, impress, and convert shoppers into buyers.
Types of Automotive Merchandising That Work for Dealers
The Fundamentals of In-Person Merchandising
Let’s start with the foundational tactics of in-person automotive merchandising — the classics that still influence how dealerships present cars today.
These tactics are very well known and understood, and designed to grab your attention. The basics include:
- The vehicle itself – fresh and clean inside & out.
- Stickers on the windshield commenting about low mileage, great price, some killer feature, the Monroney sticker. Simple & easy.
Things eventually started to get more creative…
- The spinning car
- The Land Rover stuck motionless but appearing to crawl over fake boulders
- Carvana’s fresh approach with their novel car vending machines. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, it’s brilliant merchandising.
We’ve put together a sample list of these types of vendors down below.
The Fundamentals of Online Vehicle Merchandising for Dealerships
Online vehicle merchandising is how dealerships present their inventory on digital platforms — from their own website to third-party marketplaces. The goal? To capture a shopper’s attention in seconds and give them enough information to take the next step.
Even today, many online inventory merchandising tools try to mimic the in-person experience: a strong visual focus and aggressive pricing. And while these elements still matter, they’re not enough on their own.
High-quality vehicle photos remain non-negotiable. Video walkarounds, 360° views, and virtual test drives are now easier than ever to create and publish. If you’re not already using video, your dealership is falling behind. There’s no shortage of vendors — check out a few we recommend below.
However, many pricing-based solutions — like “Good Deal” badges or price thumbs-up icons — rely on one strategy: lower your price. That means negotiating against yourself before a buyer even engages. It’s not sustainable and it doesn’t build long-term trust.
Evolving Beyond Price & Photos: What’s Next for Online Inventory Merchandising
As online car shopping matures, buyers now expect more than just good photos and a low price. They want context — details that help them feel confident about their purchase before they ever reach out.
Here’s how next-gen online merchandising strategies empower your team and your buyers:
- Repair & history transparency — Easily surface CarFax or AutoCheck reports.
- Auto-injected feature data — Data providers link together the VIN with optional build data, like premium or cold weather packages, automatically injecting them into the vehicle display page (VDP).
- QR code integration — Let shoppers instantly access more info while walking your lot.
These enhancements turn your inventory display into a rich, decision-ready experience that builds trust and improves lead quality.
Advanced Online Vehicle Merchandising Strategies
All of the solutions above miss something important. They lack any relationship to what’s happening in the consumer’s local market. Those solutions can’t answer:
- How quickly does this vehicle sell?
- How popular is the trim, color, engine in my market?
- How much local supply is available?
- How does the price compare to similar mileage vehicles in my local market?
When a merchandising solution answers these questions, consumers can now see the same local market data that dealers know. This is what our Badges product delivers to over 700 dealerships today.
In the example below, Badges empowers both dealers and consumers to see that there is only one of these vehicles available within a 50 mile radius. When your sales and BDC team say “This one will sell quickly because there is only one available in our market”, they’re backed by local-market data, giving them credibility and building trust with the customer.
The ROI of Vehicle Merchandising
Marketers struggle to measure merchandising’s impact. To be fair, measurable return-on-investment has never been the goal of merchandising. You can’t measure the ROI of putting balloons everywhere, washing cars, or serving coffee and bottled water in the service area, after all.
At a bare minimum, the output of merchandising is a simple talk track for the sales person.
- “That Jeep sure is sparkling! We just detailed it inside and out. Wanna take a look?”
- “Isn’t it cool how we parked that Land Rover on that big rock pile? Wanna hop in?”
When a dealer or software provider does vehicle merchandising to its fullest extent, it should create powerful talk tracks.
- “Take a look at this data from TradePending. It shows there’s only one available here in this area, and that it’s priced lower mileage than similar vehicles.”
- “You can see here that CarFax shows a great repair history and a single owner.”
Online merchandising solutions should be measurable, and in fact you should demand it. Just request that the provider sends their “event” data into Google Analytics, and voila, you can create segments to show how users engage differently when interacting with merchandising products. Here’s a great case study on Badges that shows data from three different dealers. Their website visitors are 3x more engaged when they interact with Badges.
Also key to merchandising? Persuasion. One of the key points of persuasion with merchandising is price, a double-edged sword, as we’ve seen above.
You’ll always talk price. The price IS merchandising. But don’t negotiate with yourself, and don’t drop the price to get a better badge from a 3rd party, or just because someone asked. Discuss price in the context of supply, demand, value, and urgency. To do that, you’re going to need better data (take a look at Badges, if you haven’t yet!).
Vehicle Merchandising Companies
Looking for a few examples of vehicle merchandising providers and companies?
Market Data
TradePending – Badges highlights what makes your used vehicles unique and your new inventory different from your competitors’. Conversations begin with value, rather than a race to the bottom on price. If you have inventory, you need Badges.
CarStory Market Report (now called Promote) – mostly focuses on vehicle features and price, and whether or not the consumer is getting a great/good/fair/above market deal.
How is CarStory different from Badges?
CarStory is primarily a solution for consumers, and a 3rd party lead provider. Their dealer-facing product is a good solution, but provides consumers and dealer no context of supply and demand in their local market. There’s no data around vehicle popularity, nor popularity of specific attributes of the vehicle (engine / trim / color). These data points truly help build value and create urgency in the mind of the consumer.
Photo & Video
DEP-i – photos, videos, and more
Sold Online Dealer Assistant – photos, videos, inventory management
Cartender – “top shelf video technology”
SpinCar – Auto dealerships use their car capture & merchandising technology to engage website visitors and sell more cars. 360 walk-arounds and more.
Glo3D – 360 degree car photography
Tru Images – photos and photo management software
Snaplot by HomeNetAutomotive – Use any smartphone or tablet to take photos on your lot and upload them wirelessly, improving time to market and shopper engagement.
Video Online by HomeNetAutomotive – Automatically transform your existing photos and data into videos, or create custom live videos for the ultimate media experience.
eVN AutoGraph – automatically delivering “photo real” imagery of your entire inventory: VIN specific, absolutely product correct, emotive images.
SmartLot Solutions – photography, 360 spins, live video, backgrounds, etc
CarData – CarData, Inc. offers Full Service Inventory Merchandising to automotive retailers. Quality Photos, Engaging Videos & Reliable on-the-lot service is what you will get when partnering with us. Our highly trained staff ensures your inventory is always up to date with no headaches! Full 360 vehicle tours, Walkaround videos, Quality photography, Window Labels & buyers guides
Vehicle Descriptions & Data
Cars.com AutoCorrected – AutoCorrected™ fills in the gaps on key data points for shoppers searching on Cars.com and creates a richer VDP experience for all your inventory.
PowerWriter Next by HomeNet Automotive- Generate new and used car descriptions in seconds with PowerWriter Next. This solution helps you connect with shoppers through automatic, customizable messaging with flexible settings and multiple templates that better describe your dealership.
Window Stickers
Kelley Blue Book window stickers – Kelley Blue Book window stickers help drive trust and confidence with your shoppers while they visit your lot. (But why are you advertising for KBB? Read this article to understand why that’s not a great idea)
AutoRevolution – mostly focused on dealer websites and data services, but provides custom Monroney stickers also
DealerUPlink – QR code stickers. Scan with your phone, get more info.
Other
NuVinAir – When customers buy a new car, they don’t want the previous owner’s odor haunting them. NuVinAir® takes cars from stinky to Stinkin’ Nu!