I sell cars (FL), and this is definitely the new trend thanks to all the third party pricing sites like truecar, cargurus, etc, and the crazy success of Carmax. With the competition so fierce in most areas, dealerships don’t have the ability to mark up prices online because customers are no longer willing to spend days shopping at dealerships, they look online and may contact a few, but ultimately the average customer visits less than 2 stores. Instead, they’ll spend 10-20 hours online doing research then go to the one that has the vehicle they want at the lowest price.
The biggest difference between dealerships will be how they price new cars and handle trades. Many will show crazy low prices to get customers in , then once they have you there, pull the price away and explain the advertised price is only valid for factory workers, military, etc. trade value is the last toss up these days, and because of the aggressive online pricing, dealerships are forced to try to hold money on trade value instead. At the end of the day, a smart buyer knows dealerships can play the Shell game with numbers and should be considered with OTD/payments.
The downside of all this is that customers have been conditioned for the last 30+ years to haggle and have, for the most part, vehemently objected. Now that dealerships are moving to a ‘no haggle’ pricing system, people are seeing pricing thousands lower than the competition, but still trying to haggle because they’ve been conditioned to think that if they take that internet price they’ve been ripped off.
As an example, I sell Ram trucks and even though they just got a brand new redesign and are fantastic trucks, they are still 5-7k off. 2 months ago, ram had incentives based on the msrp, so top of the line trucks were 13-15k off. We had people coming in and seeing a 70k truck for under $60k otd, and still asking for another 2-3k off. We’d send them home, and the first week of the next month we had dozens of people begging us to honor that deal we were offering, unfortunately, those incentives had ended and that same $70k truck was now closer to $66k otd.
In conclusion, would you as a consumer rather have a deal ahead of time that the internet tells you is good and saves you time, or would you rather go in at sticker and spend 6-8 hours trying to negotiate? I’d bet 99% would rather have the first and would save money that way too.