Edmunds.com has made the first acquisition in company history, announcing this morning it has purchased a mobile startup known as CarCodeSM that lets dealers and car shoppers conduct one-on-one text messaging with each other.

Edmunds plans to launch this technology across its dealership network, providing CarCode for free to both dealers and consumers.

“Car shoppers are clamoring for mobile solutions, and we saw an opportunity to provide an on-demand mobile experience through the CarCode platform,” said Seth Berkowitz, president of Edmunds.com.

“We are laser-focused on streamlining the car shopping experience, and this acquisition is just one example of the investment we are making in mobile technology to achieve our goal,” he continued. “We think CarCode provides a very relevant service that ties directly to the growing trend in mobile showrooming and shopping.”

Explaining more about CarCode, Edmunds said in its announcement that the cloud-based SMS texting platform was designed to allow dealership to be able to text back-and-forth with consumers straight from their mobile devices. Edmunds is also providing text-message leads to participating dealers and giving them the option to place a “Text Us” button on their websites.

There is also an interface giving dealers the ability to manage conversations by displaying unanswered messages and average response time.  

CarCode was discovered when it won Edmunds’ second annual Hackomotive challenge last February. The technology then went through further development via Edmunds’ three-month Fastlane Accelerator program.

Nick Gorton, who co-founded CarCodeSMS with Steve Schwartz and Prabode Weebadde, grew up in the dealership world and joins Edmunds as executive director of product management.

“We developed CarCodeSMS after realizing customers weren’t able to communicate with dealerships the way a growing number of them actually preferred, via text messaging,” Gorton said.