 "volvo")
Following Mercedes' model, Swedish luxury car manufacturer, Volvo is planning to move entirely to directly to customers for all its retail sales, ETAuto reported. Volvo will be the second luxury car company to adopt the Direct-to-Customer (D2C) retail business model after Mercedes Benz India.
Talking about the development, Managing Director of Volvo Cars India, Jyoti Malhotra told ETAuto, “We opted for a direct sales model for the XC40 and the response has been good. Now we will opt for C40 Recharge as well. The plan is to gradually move all the models to this direction."
With this move, Volvo will own its entire stock of the respective car models and sell them via appointed franchise partners. This will allow Volvo to invoice the new cars directly to the customers while also taking care of bookings and orders.
Earlier, Mercedes Benz India started selling its cars directly to the customers via Retail of the Future (ROTF) business model in October 2021. Before India, Mercedes had launched the ROTF model in South Africa, Sweden, and Austria.
Industry experts say that such a model may not be practical for mass-market cars given their large sales volumes. However, it may work for premium carmakers and the likes of BMW, Audi, and JLR may follow this trend gradually, ETAuto reported.
Around the globe, Elon Musk-owned Tesla sells its cars directly to its customers via an online platform. While it has showrooms for customers to experience Tesla vehicles, take test drives etc, the sale and transactions are done directly by Tesla.
